


Expat

by SpicaV



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-02
Updated: 2020-06-20
Packaged: 2021-03-03 19:01:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 35,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24510499
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpicaV/pseuds/SpicaV
Summary: Everyday lives in the Star Trek universe. Selde, a former Lieutenant in Starfleet Sciences, returns to her foster family on Vulcan and explores her relationship with her brother Tolen, sister T'Vell, and their extended family. Cultural and cross-cultural tensions sometimes arise, taboos are skirted, and deserts are explored. Mentions of Star Trek: The Original Series events occur throughout, but original characters are the focus.
Comments: 7
Kudos: 13





	1. Chapter 1

“Welcome to Vulcan Spaceport. Please disembark in an orderly manner and consult the terminal directory for connecting flights. The Ground Shuttle is located in the T’aal Terminal. Welcome to Vulcan Spaceport. Please disembark...”

Selde, Lieutenant no longer, shouldered her Starfleet issue duffel and sidestepped into line with a set of Andorian twins at her back and a blond human with a slight DFW drawl inches from the front of her black canvas sneakers. This trio of relatively interesting travel companions had been assigned to her breakfast table above the promenade; the six-day shuttle from Starbase 28 had been otherwise monotonous, with no nebulae, comets, or tantruming gods to menace the ship. The Twin’s bickering and southern gentleman’s flirting had kept her only marginally entertained. Not for the first time she questioned her decision to leave the Fleet.

The Texan—Nicholas—hummed “She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain” as one last tribute. He had accepted by day three that she was not interested and strolled the passenger decks open to them while they chatted and talked shop: Strange name, Sel- _ dey _ , where’d it come from? Her mother had been a literature fan and picked it up out of an Englishman’s door-stopper of a novel; how did he become interested in zero-g rodeo? He now gave her a wink before he peeled off of the line of disembarking passengers. “‘Bye, Calico,” he said, blue eyes fairly dancing with mischief and no hard feelings that she hadn’t yielded to his advances. 

She liked that. Grace in defeat. 

The disembarking Andorians nodded as one, the woman of the pair pressing an awkward hand to Selde’s shoulder in a sort of commiseration for her going to the planet below instead of on the next leg of their journey. Wherever that was. She had been told and forgotten after browsing through her collection of farewells from the  _ U.S.S. Enterprise _ ’s science department. Her family for the past four years. First under Captain Pike, then Kirk, gone now on the final two years of his five-year mission. She wouldn’t miss him much, nice fellow, but a bit too lothario-like. She would miss her botany crew mates and Dr. McCoy, with whom she liked to keep company. He had helped her with several experiments, balancing nutrition in hybrid peoples, and they culminated their work by submitting a paper to the Vulcan Science Academy.

She stood aside to let her skin adjust to Vulcan Spaceport, the temperature set to match the northern hemisphere’s current spring mildness. Near 31º C, by the feel of it. Dry heat, the kind she loved. Starships were set on the cool side of her preference, and like her Commander aboard the  _ Enterprise _ , she had worn a thermal undershirt and opted for the uniform-with-trousers option. Now, her arms bare in the sleeveless linen dress, she welcomed the desert.

Vulcan rotated below, placid and desert-subtle in color. Pale, dusty greys and browns, like the wings of a mourning dove. Dusted orange, violet, thin threads of deep green along seas, lakes, mountains, and waterways. A skirting of snow at each pole. Utah-meets-Mars in her estimation. Home, more than Earth had been, for she had known her native planet for only five short, chaotic years of her early life, her mother well-meaning but too flighty and too interested in a wide variety of unrelated subjects to make much of a career. Her mother had come to Vulcan to study the Kolinahr philosophy, an endeavor doomed from the start. Luckily, Heather Bride met T’Laet and her husband Vanet, who took her under their proverbial wings and worked with them to create a botany lab. They catered to the diverse dietary needs of colony planets. Selde had cut her teeth on using a pipette to combine different minerals into native grains, genetically designed to give colonists a head start on nutrition in the tenuous early years of settlement. Her Vulcan “brother” Tolen at her side, Aunt T’Laet and Uncle Vanet took her in and taught her logic, botany, the Vulcan lute, and gifted her a copious vocabulary. 

“There you are,” Tolen’s voice soft and deep behind her right shoulder. 

Selde refocused her gaze on the curved transparent aluminum window and their paired reflection against the dark Southern Sea. She smiled at her brother using her reflection, and he allowed a small, conservative smile to quirk his own mouth. A concession, just for her. 

“Here  _ we _ are,” she said, low, in his ShiKhar dialect. 

“Are you ready to go home?”

“Not quite.” She lowered her duffel and stepped back so that Tolen stood at her side, her deep auburn hair just meeting the top of his shoulder. She gave him a glance, her eyes a greyer green than he remembered, his black hair thick with a tight curl that she had almost forgotten. Moderately tall. Deep bronze skin. Plush mouth. He favored his father, Vanet. “It’s been five years, Brother Mine, just let me savor this.”

Tolen nodded once, his face gone impassive once again, and they turned to regard the planet together and savored silence born of long love and admiration. The Southern Sea slid toward sunset, and the vaster Northern turned into view. Their shuttle to the surface would depart in an hour. At last she tired of watching the planet roll on its belly and turned to Tolen. Picked up her duffel and offered it to him with a wicked grin. 

He rolled his eyes, a subtle gesture that looked like a long blink to anyone passing by, and took the duffel, bulging to its seams. “Is your other luggage tagged for the Ground Shuttle?” he asked as they swayed past a knot of Denebrians arguing in front of a terminal map. 

“No other. This is all I have.” Selde nodded at the bag. “Gave away most everything else. What you have is three dresses, my boots, and a jacket. And all of the other ‘crud’ I collected. I brought your parents a Bartlett pear tree in status for their arboretum. There’s an Antarean tapestry in there for you, and a set of enameled cups from Risa, for Vell. Not the—ah—pleasure part of the planet but the Westward Pilgrimage Road. These kind of lotus-flower patterns. Represent renewal and order from chaos. How is Vell? I mean, T’Vell?”

“Well,” Tolen said, calm and blinking innocently, knowing that the rhyme would irk Selde. She shot him a dirty look laced with amusement and fondness. Teasing siblings were similar the whole galaxy over. “She is pleased that you will be here for the final ceremony of our Bonding. She and I will return to the lab and… honeymoon at a later time.”

An unspoken taboo wavered within his pause. Selde smiled in reassurance and joined him in the orderly line curving into the Ground Shuttle bay. Mostly Vulcans, here. One Tellarite in a cooling cloth tailored to look like a desert softsuit. Two Edosians with twelve limbs between them. One other human, a woman young enough to openly gawk at the people around her. Selde spied a VSA Student clip on her travel kit and raised one eyebrow.  _ More than meets the eye _ , she thought.  _ Be humble _ . 

She sighed and closed her eyes as they settled into their seats, Tolen squeezing her hand once in the equivalent of a kiss on the cheek. She smiled and squeezed back, breathing deep to try and ease her body toward a longer day than she was used to. Like her mother, she was over-optimistic and knew it; insomnia and fatigue would tug at her for several days until her  _ Enterprise  _ hours eased into Vulcan’s day/night cycle. Her time aboard the shuttle had been brief enough that it had not mattered. Much. 

“...and T’Vell will return earlier in the afternoon than as is her custom. Her brother, Senet, is living with us in the south wing, so you will have a neighbor.”

“Mm?” Selde opened her eyes as the shuttle unmoored. 

“Senet. T’Vell’s older brother. He is a hydrogeologist with the province. He spent some time on the Kelistar Asteroid Settlement, so you will have something in common.”

“What, exactly?” She gave him a dry look and tried not to notice the planet looming toward them from the port. Shuttle descents always made her nauseous. 

“You have both experienced space exploration.”

Selde smirked and turned her attention back to her eyelids and her breath. In. Out. Half an hour and they would be on solid ground.  _ “In common.” Guy is a space rock jockey with an auger and a cistern. I do not think he faced down any space amoebas or Rihannsu bent on his destruction _ , she thought. Knew it was uncharitable, even on the heels of the admonishment she had given herself on the Spaceport. She glanced down the aisle at the young human woman, gawking no longer but gone grey beneath her dark skin. Space-sick, like she was. Selde sent her a wordless prayer for comfort and closed her eyes again.

***

“I’m okay, I’m okay. Honest.”

“You do not look so.” Tolen’s voice reached her, smooth and almost amused, the brat. “You look faintly green, which is to say normal, if you were Vulcan.”

“Veruul.” Selde spoke into her palms, which she had mashed across her mouth. Curse words were among the first “gifts” to translate across cultures.

Tolen tilted his head at the Romulan word, almost a Vulcan cognate but not quite. He set the ground car to an easy crawl as it entered the residential area far from ShiKhar city center. The Ge'rett Hills rose up around them, with undulating sandstone cliffs the tawny color of lion hides rearing skyward and carved by an ancient river. They curved around to create a sheltering valley about the village below. Pret had been a shrine to the minor North Sea deity, M’sharis, in the millennia before Surak and meditations of logic made their way slowly around the planet. The shrine still operated as a space for meditation, though its connection to childbirth was still strong; a school for midwives and doulas there provided continuity to the ancient past. The school’s symbol was M’sharis caressing her round belly, with a v’pret thorn-flower woven into her hair. 

Selde walked after Tolen as they passed through the garden into the arched dome of their childhood home. Most of the structure was underground with a round, main hall chiseled from grey stone and windows at each of the four compass points. Hallways winged out under the four windows, the kitchen to the west, bedrooms and private rooms to the other four directions. Skylights to the subterranean rooms were hidden among in-situ boulders and gnarled llal’en trees, reminiscent of Utah cedar. Vritt’al moths with inky blue wings fluttered between flowering xeriscape plants native to the basin. A few imports from Earth’s deserts thrived here as well: evening primrose, as white as paper; thick salvias with wands of purple blossoms; lavenders and genetically modified heath. A few thymes, low and thick, exhaled fragrance beneath their feet at the edges of flagstones, and Selde felt her nausea subside slightly. She should have chewed ginger or taken a mari-sat tablet; they worked better for her than any hypospray. 

ShiKahr glittered on the horizon, just beginning to waver with late-morning heat. A pale yellow and silver rak bird chirped a victorious song; her eggs had hatched, her mate was bringing vritt’al for their children, this territory was hers. Somewhere in a neighboring garden the male bird trilled, announcing his hunt. 

Cool darkness swallowed them as they descended stone steps into the central hall, the change in temperature as physically intense as though they were entering a well of water. Selde sighed and felt her headache lighten a little; Vulcan’s higher gravity was already at work on her. As her eyes adjusted to shadow she felt as if she were in a dream. There stood her mother’s baby grand piano against the tallest stone wall. A small library of real bound books set into nooks, several holos of her and Tolen in the bio lab, scrambling on the Arches of ShenKar, one formal portrait of Selde at her Starfleet graduation. The curved couch with cushions of a dove grey. Very little had changed, since she left. And yet, traces. A rose-colored scarf made the austere room softer, a silver kal-toh set left half-finished on a shelf beside a bonsai pine. And a gentle, sweet smell. Perfume. Sandalwood and cedar, vanilla. 

“Welcome home,” Tolen said, drawing Selde into a real hug, an act of sibling intimacy that he used only when shielded away from the rest of Vulcan society, where every adult citizen was considered marriageable. Not to mention a history of delicate social balance, clan agreements, eugenics-by-marriage, and the Koon-ut-kalifee. He kissed her forehead and allowed a warm smile that lit his eyes more than his mouth. “Rest. I shall make tea.” 

“Rooibos, please.” Selde slumped on the couch, her lavender travelling dress billowing out around her like a fallen flag. 

“It would be wise to consume a stimulant, such as Earl Grey or Irish breakfast, if you wish to rest at a reasonable hour tonight,” Tolen said, going to the kitchen and rustling among an upright chest of gleaming black lacquer. “It is yet thirteen hours until your standard hour for sleep.”

“Shit,” Selde murmured to herself and rubbed her eyes. “Better make it coffee.”

Her brother smiled to himself as he readied the coffee, enough for two, for it was a secret vice of his. Vulcan metabolism negated much of the stimulant effect, but the rich taste, with a dash of milk and nutmeg, was a sensual change from the usual virtue of tea. T’Vell often took it with him in bed on cool mornings, when the subterranean air swirled crisp around them, her body bare under comforter and sheet. That they bedded together before their final Bonding was not a scandal in Vulcan society, at least among the new generation. For her grandparents, however, they kept up the pretense of living separately, with T’Vell and Senet “living” in the southern corridor and he to the north. His own family, of the House of Surak, was simultaneously more progressive, more curious about new traditions and outside worlds while simultaneously guarding their House traditions in a new era.

Presently a soft, tentative strain of “Hallelujah” trickled from the piano, kept in tune since Tolen had developed a fondness for the instrument. Selde preferred the guitar and flute, though she had learned a few songs from her mother. She now sat at the piano, winced at a jangled false note, nodded through the minor fall and major lift. 

“You do not have to prepare breakfast,” Tolen said, bringing a cup of coffee on rattling china, a pale cream color with a wreath of heather. “You are at home and are not expected to adhere to the traditions of a guest.”

“How generous of you. ‘God made the vittles, but the devil made the cook,’” she said, grinning. “I’ve gotten better since I was a kid. People aboard the _Enterprise_ said my croissants were so light and flaky that they could float on air.”

“Perhaps you used helium instead of flour.” 

Selde snorted into her first sip of coffee. 

Tolen sobered. “I have missed you. Your mother’s memorial shrine has been added to the grotto above the spring. We may visit it when the sun begins to set.” 

“Thank you,” she said, voice flat. Selde and Heather had not parted on the best of terms, her mother wanting her to stay on-planet while she had chafed at the rigor and sameness of Vulcan, the tradition of living in Clan houses with two or three generations together in the cavernous halls. T’Laet had been instrumental in convincing Heather to let Selde go into Starfleet, after Selde had run away with the characteristic overreaction of a child with an overprotective parent. Gone for a year, her Vulcan family could only guess at what she had done from age seventeen to eighteen, but she  _ had _ returned. Hair longer, a tattoo of the constellation Virgo across her shoulder blades, and a mouth like a merchant sailor. T’Laet had felt that the discipline of the Fleet would be good for her adopted human daughter. Heather had grudgingly accepted.

Her mother had died en route to a symposium on modified grains at Antares when a trading vessel, piloted by an inexperienced whelp of a Rigellian, crashed into the starboard nacelle. The transport,  _ U.S.S. Owl _ , had imploded with no survivors. 

Selde had taken bereavement leave from her first cadet year. She had spent it in the deserts of Utah, rather than flying home. 

Tolen now left her to her silence and cleaned the kitchen; he was fastidious, unlike his wife and sister. His brother-in-law was shy of company and kept most often to his rooms, save for when his own friends visited. Tolen found cleaning to be another kind of meditation, of ordering the world within his reach. After the silence stretched far into the hour he returned to find Selde napping on the couch, a silver shawl she had retrieved from her room draped over her feet. 

He judged he could allow her one full sleep cycle before waking her. Perhaps T’Vell would return home before he would need to; he allowed himself this hope, for Selde was a bear when she was woken from a nap. T’Vell would soften any tyrant’s temper. He picked up the sneakers that Selde had toed off onto a rug of alpaca wool, the fibers dyed a light spring green. 

His ko’hai-nahr, his sister-by-choice. He looked forward to having his family together, once again.


	2. Family

Starfleet crisis training was hard to shake, even in safe settings; Selde listened to her surroundings before she moved or opened her eyes. Tolen’s voice murmured in the kitchen. A response to a question. Scents of vanilla and spice—perhaps cinnamon—curled through the air. The words “apricots,” “blueberries,” and “to welcome” in a woman’s muted voice that she half recognized. An unknown male’s reply reverberated in the cavernous rooms: tenor, spoken in a low purr, a sensual quality.

She opened one green eye to a slit. T’Vell stood in the kitchen archway, a large bowl of apricots in her hands and a placid expression on her face. Old-fashioned braids pinned atop her head, rather than the current trendy bob. She reminded Selde of a German milkmaid, only with olive skin and obsidian-black hair. Narrow shoulders, long fingers, plump mouth that telegraphed good humor whether it meant to or not. She was speaking to her brother behind her, a slender man with his hair slightly longer than Vulcan male standard. Deep green desert softsuit. Early thirties. Stern mouth, but his eyes were the same as T’Vell’s. There was compassion in them, even if the rest of his face remained composed in a neutral expression that humans often mistook for arrogance. He was speaking in the ShiKhar dialect that accentuated his purring voice.

“...the aquifer has replenished, but the settlement planning committee requested a second assessment.”

“Did you accept?” 

“No. I do not wish to go into settlement work. Not at this time. The incident at Keristar is yet too… recent.”

“Understandable.”

Selde opened her eyes as T’Vell placed the bowl of apricots on the table, made from the central bore of an ancient dune-cedar. The woman raised her head in surprise, like a doe startled in a wood. They smiled at one another, Selde with a grin and T’Vell with a glimmer in her eyes. 

“Sister—”

“T’Vell—” both speaking at once, Selde rose and embraced the other woman with a warm hug of family. The Vulcan woman did not hesitate, to her surprise, but held her close to a moment. This is where the scent of vanilla came from, anointed at her throat and wrists. “Vresh’ta, you have grown up!”

“As have you,” T’Vell drew back with her control in place, though her eyes and voice remained honey-warm. 

Indeed, she looked different, no longer in her willowy early twenties but skirting thirty, the decade of Vulcan maturity. Hips, breasts, the arch of her slender neck, the strength in her arms, though they remained concealed in the long-sleeved dress she preferred. She looked like a woman. Selde, at twenty-five, felt at last that they were the same age. Although T’Vell’s longer lifespan meant that her maturation came later, they had resembled puppyish teenagers for so long that Selde felt as if time had stood still. And now here they were, adults, equals, sisters. Tolen and T’Vell were lucky; they were each a friend to their spouse, a stroke of fortune not always guaranteed in the arranged marriages into which most Vulcans entered at age seven. Selde kissed T’Vell on the cheek, stirred by this confirmation.

“My brother, Senet,” T’Vell said, drawing back and presenting him with a nod in his direction. 

He stepped forward, drawing out both hands from where they clasped behind his back. Right hand split into the ta’al. “Live long and prosper,” he said in Standard, and although he remained composed there was a spark of polite curiosity about his eyes. Like humans, Vulcans were a curious race. 

“Peace and long life,” Selde said, returning the ta’al before putting her right hand out in a bold offering of the North American States handshake. In Vulcan, she said “Good to meet you, Senet, my Brother-by-Marriage.”

Senet blinked, and the barest trace of smile curved his mouth. He took her hand, matching the strength of her grip. “I believe your word is ‘brother-in-law’?”

“Yup.” Selde grinned, irreverent, yet concentrating on keeping her inner emotions neutral as possible so that Senet would not have to sense them through the intimate clasp of their hands. His flesh felt feverish to her own, though it was only a biological difference in norms. There was a slick scar on the back of his hand, still a deeper green than the surrounding skin. She made sure not to brush this as she let go, knowing how long scars could ache, even if medical science could knit them in an instant.

They all stood back, venturing into small talk for a while to ease into the new order of their lives. What was your last mission, why hydrogeology, what did she think of the famous captain of the  _ Enterprise _ , how soon was the Bonding ceremony, what else needed to be done? Tolen and Selde withdrew into the kitchen to share in making dinner, Tolen throwing pizza dough into the air on his fists while Selde chirped “Miss it! Miss it!” She used a knife at the cutting board, laden with basil, tomatoes, and creamy mozzarella and a new bottle of olive oil, a gift from T’Vell and Senet to welcome a member of their family home.

  
  


***

  
  


Vulcan society largely operated on the concept of gifts and reciprocation, even among established families. Guests showed appreciation for hospitality by preparing breakfast. Children-by-marriage entered into a Clan and presented gifts of food, textiles, and oil to their new families. In ancient times, a marriage was reciprocated by another marriage or a gift of slaves and livestock, but these traditions had fortunately been discarded long ago. A returning traveler presented gifts gathered from their travels, a tradition shared by many societies on earth. 

After dinner, with night fallen, they gathered on the lower balcony that jutted out over a slope leading down to the grotto spring that fed their household with water. The spring was ancient and gave sweet water; it had belonged to the V’Pret Clan by water rights passed down through hundreds of generations. When Tolen’s parents removed to ShiKhar they gifted the water rights—unofficially shared with several other nearby houses—and celebrated the transition with another event shared between Earth and Vulcan cultures: the neighborhood potluck. Selde, leaning on the carved stone railings, watched someone’s electric torch waver on the path to the spring, which was popular for expecting mothers and young married couples. Local legend said that the waters granted an easy conception or swift labor, and although Vulcans were past such superstitions, the tradition remained. 

“Placebo effect,” Selde murmured into her forearms, dry and smelling faintly of salt. Insomnia racketed about her skull even as her eyes wished to pull shut. Maybe a walk to the spring and back would provide enough exertion to let her sleep at a reasonable hour. 

“Excuse me.” Senet’s purring voice, at her left elbow. He gave her a handleless cup of steaming rooibos tea. 

“Just babbling to myself. With thanks.” Selde took the cup and nodded down at the flicker of light descending into the stone grotto. “I said ‘placebo effect.’ The legends about the spring.”

“Ah.” Senet, a cup of his own, nodded and placed his free hand to the small of his back with an awkward glance down the hill. “I have heard them. M’sharis blessed the springs for creation and birth.”

He neglected to mention the part of the legend that the waters of the spring were supposed to be from the waters of M’sharis’s ripe womb, mixed with the milk from her full breasts. 

“Indeed. To M’sharis.” Selde toasted the spring with her tea just as the torch-beam vanished. The grotto, a cup of sandstone, brightened with fitful light.

She turned with Senet back toward the fire ring that flickered with gas-powered flame, the CO2 vacuum integrated with the surrounding stone so well as to be invisible. Firejewel rock, quarried from the southern spur of the Llangon Mountains, glowed in the center, and green copper chimes rung on the overhand from the upper balcony, a small place where Tolen preferred to meditate. Aside from the flickering fire and starlight, the balcony and house were dark. T’Kuhl glowed as a thin crescent, this week. 

Murmurs passed between Tolen and T’Vell, who sat close on a low divan of pale green and honeyed wood. A set of three as a Bonding gift from Vanet. 

“Since the prodigal daughter returneth,” Selde spoke at a natural lull between their conversation. “I have brought thee gifts.”

Tolen smirked at the formal language and sat back with one leg kicking the night air. Imp. 

“From the looms of Antares, I bring you this, ya pest.” Selde pulled a rolled tapestry out of her Starfleet duffel and handed it to Tolen. He unfurled the woolen cloth, a deep red background so dark as to appear black in the firelight. Gold and copper threads and beads made from blue-green apatite, woven into the warp and woof, made the shape of the 40 Eridani A star system. They glittered and glowed in the firelight. He looked from it up to Selde, and nodded, touched beyond speech. The gift was a fine one and an acknowledgement of his maternal great-foremother, to whom he had been close. She had been a weaver and kept a herd of v’narr, animals akin to Hexi Cashmere goats. He had helped her shear and card their wool as a boy, and he had learned to stir and dip into the dye pots, made of copper and passed down through the previous six generations. 

“For Sis, six tea bowls from Risa. The Pilgrimage Road, not the—ah—recreational centers found in the cities. This lotus blossom motif is actually of the rillen flower. It represents order from chaos, like kal-toh.” Selde handed the pottery cups glazed with an amethyst purple to T’Vell, who took the set apart to reveal the pure white flower in the center. “They’re rare flowers. Bloom once only every twelve years, when the historically hectic weather on Risa would calm.”

T’Vell bowed her thanks and drew forth a folded cloth. “And for you, vresh’ta.” 

“With thanks.” Selde wrapped the soft shawl about her shoulders. Copped-colored wool, with a stripe of pale violet at each end and tassels of the same color. “Is this one of your cousin’s, Tolen?”

“Yes. T’Prina. She passes on her welcome to you and asks that we visit her in Pell once the monsoons have passed. She wove this one on T’Min’s small loom.” 

“Invitation accepted.” Selde paused and considered Senet, then rose. “I’ll be right back.”

The three Vulcans watched the grotto flare and dim with the pilgrim’s torchlight and two meteors streak across the northwest sky. To the west a thundercloud caught against the Llangon range and bubbled with lightning. Early indicators of the summer monsoons that would soon rage across the northern deserts as the southern ones experienced their winter of fog and dew. The reservoir collectors pulled moisture from the air into subterranean cisterns during each short winter, while a network of drainage collectors distributed summer rains. Senet idly calculated the volume of rainfall that the thunderhead might generate if the pressure dropped or rose, if the system blew east. He was a man of water, shy at the honor that his trade afforded him in Vulcan society. The badge that he wore to his office and inspecting infrastructure was a dowsing stone, worn through with water, and the symbol for the element in the five Vulcan scripts. He carried the title of Masu Tan’tor uneasily, preferring to follow kilometers of pipe while alone, spending time among the aqueducts and cisterns, the natural water sources of the earth beneath his feet.

“Here. For Senet.” Selde ghosted out of the darkness with her hands clasped in front of her, holding something concealed in her palms. 

Senet, not expecting any gift, blinked in surprise and cupped both of his hands together. She smiled and came to him, close enough that he could smell the lavender soap that she favored. For the second time in the evening Selde’s hands rested in his.

Seven citrine cabochons lay in his palms; the skin of his hands suddenly cool with the loss of hers. 

“From Earth,” she said, and sat down by the fire.“You know what they are?”

“Citrine, yellow-orange stone, quartz colored by iron deposits. Mohs hardness of seven.” Senet picked the largest citrine up to watch the stones dance with light. Like holding a piece of the sun. He held her gaze for a moment and allowed the smallest of smiles to warm his mouth. “With many thanks.”

Tolen stroked the soft wool of his new tapestry and caught Selde’s eye; she had brought those citrines home for herself, hoping to have her friend S’Lira make them into a necklace similar to the one her mother had worn. The necklace had been lost when the  _ Owl _ was destroyed, and he knew that she had missed it. Reminded her of happier times, she had said, when she was small and her mother could do no wrong.

Selde shrugged, a tiny pump of her shoulders, and she opened her palm to show that her gift was freely given, a happy one, with no regret. Senet cupped the citrines and sat down beside her to watch the torch-lights emerge from the spring grotto, one light mysteriously become two. 


	3. Masu

“All the way out, beyond the farthest star, and here I am again with a damnable pipette in my hands.” Selde transferred the vitamin mix from one polymer glass tube to another. 

“You always were stubborn,” Tolen said with dry amusement. “‘Uphill, both ways, in the snow.’”

Selde set the pipette down and cleaned up her lab space. Several vials of grain sat in front of her, mysteries all in how they would turn out: mut, quadro-tikh, quadro-wheat and quadro-triticale. The other parts of the equation were soil and moisture. Acidic, alkaline, basic. Frequency of rainfall, types of irrigation.

“They better make some wicked croissants with these,” she said, more to herself than Tolen, who was also cleaning his workstation. “I’ll leave the mysteries of planting to the colonists.”

“You would not wish to enter into colony development?” T’Vell removed her safety glasses and lay her bio-scanner on the table.

“No. It’s either the road or the homefires for me, baby.” Selde removed her own goggles and followed her small family out of the botany lab. With the sun setting most of the city filtered to the markets or home to cooking hearths. Tolen and T’Vell held twinned fingers together.  _ Pairbond behavior _ , Selde thought as they strolled through underground market stalls. Food vending, bolts of cloth, secondhand items, a few trinket stands that catered to offworld tourists. She shook her head at the audacity of a snowglobe containing a tiny model of the Vulcan Science Academy. 

She watched her brother and T’Vell sway ahead, drawn by the fresh fruit and vegetables of the farmer’s market. T’Vell procured a linen bag and began adding things to it: kreyla bread, blueberries, a few fistfuls of dark leafy greens, a bag of noodles. 

The clean scent of dune-cedar and water curled around her, and she smiled. 

“Good evening. Shall I escort you home?” Senet stepped up beside her. Of course they would go home together; they had to catch the same shuttle. 

“Depends if you buy me a drink first, Sailor.” Selde bumped his upper arm with her shoulder. He raised an eyebrow in silent inquiry. “Sorry. That’s a new one for you. It’s a rather… provocative invitation, according to Earth traditions.”

“Ah. What kind of ‘drink’ was traditional in such a transaction?”

“Not water or milk. Too wholesome. Hard liquor, usually.” Selde glanced at him, enjoying the smile high in his eyes. She had often had to explain to fellow Human expatriates that Vulcans smiled and laughed all the time, just not with their mouths. Emotion was to be mastered, not suppressed or nonexistent. That no, her name was not from any dialect of Vulcan but a word made up by a 20th-century linguist, and it was missing an umlaut on the final e. Dr. McCoy had expressed surprise that she was not Vulcan herself, based on her name on the ship’s manifest.

The foursome stepped off of the shuttle an hour later with a trio of doulas, heading toward the college. T’Vell took interest and began a conversation with them about herbs, diet, and euphemistic “seasonal” changes. 

“Nest feathering,” Selde said beneath her breath to Senet as they pulled ahead. “I also caught her looking at baby blankets tonight.”

“Their final Bonding is in three days. It is unfortunate that elopement is not an option at this time.” Senet walked close enough that the back of his hand brushed her bare forearm. The touch pleased him; he was wed, like most Vulcan men, since childhood, but his wife never deigned to know him well. He had tried to honor her with a visit each year once he reached his age of majority, but T’Gris had thus far shown no interest in reciprocating. His visits had dwindled to once every three years. He wished for companionship much like the kind that T’Vell possessed with her husband but knew it to be an unfulfilled desire. Selde showed him that same companionship. It was a taste of his wish fulfilled, and he could only sample it.

Selde glanced down at his hand. He pulled it behind his back, with apologies.

“No, it’s not that.” She reached over to draw his hand between them again, and the pad of her thumb brushed over his scar. “I was wondering about these. I wanted to get to know you a bit, before I asked.”

Senet nodded and glanced back to make sure that T’Vell was not listening, for the story disturbed her. The couple lingered far behind with the doulas. 

“You know I was serving off planet, at Keristar,” Senet said. “I had been helping the settlement set up their water systems. Of course, Keristar was an experimental design; the first colony founded on a stable asteroid cluster. Much of the construction had already been completed when I arrived, but working in spacesuits with umbilici was necessary. One of the new atmospheric generators was under repair while my team was placing cisterns; the field destabilized into a state of flux and exploded. I was caught in the blast, and this was the result.” Senet pulled up his sleeve, showing a network of green scars that traced up his forearms. “I have them from my solar plexus to my thighs. Radiation burns. I managed to get back to the hatch while dragging my partner Sarok; he was mortally wounded. I had to be sedated, and by the time I woke he had died.”

“Damn.” Selde sighed. “I am sorry. There are no good words for a loss like that.”

“He was a friend,” Senet said, in quiet eulogy. 

Evening darkened toward night with the desolate Hills glowing in shades of violet, amber, and gold. Shadows swelled in valleys of shale and mudstone while the sandstone cliffs remained warm in light from the setting run. A few bright blue lara birds flew by, warbling their waterlike song. Three sha’vokh wheeled high overhead on the last of the day’s thermal winds. Looking for a nighttime perch.

Small solar lamps that lined the walkway to home greeted them, but Selde rounded the house through the garden. Senet followed, wanting a companion, hoping he was not trespassing. 

“I’m not quite hungry for dinner yet. Want to walk to the spring?” Selde discarded her shoes on the balcony and withdrew a full water bottle from her messenger bag. 

Senet trudged after her in his desert boots and condemned himself for not taking them off; there was a sensuality in sand against bare skin, and although it was not logical he craved the sensation. It had begun shortly after Selde arrived.

The lara birds had found perch in a cedar and were twittering softly to themselves as they arranged for sleep. A few ha’ravot flashed violet, luminescent and in search of mates; the tiny insects alighting to feed on evening primrose nectar. They seemed to find the imported flowers a delicacy. One landed on Selde’s pinned braid as she stepped from the garden. Attracted by the smell of apricots in her hair. It stayed there until they began to descend into the grotto, which was lit by enough alpenglow that they did not need a torch. 

Selde sidestepped from the path that led to a family shrine above the grotto, where granite markers engraved with the names of the V’pret Clan dead were arranged around a small altar meant for incense and water offerings. The V’Pret Clan cremated its dead and left the ashes in natural niches found in a cavern above the sandstone cliffs. Blood relatives, foster children, adopted offworld family, beloved pets: all were welcome. He glanced up toward the memorial as they followed the sound of water downward; Selde preferred to mourn alone and kept her visits there private.

He could smell the water long before they saw it; his trade as a well-maker had been determined for him since a young age because of this gift. 

Vulcans had long ago arranged marriages to try and perpetuate this quirk of genetics in their children, and his Clan was renowned for the ability. It tended to fall to the girls of the family, but every now and then a boy was born with the ability to smell water from where he toddled above ground. There had been a ceremony on his second birthday, after his mother had noticed him squatting in the rust-colored sand at the base of a succulent tree. He had been patting his hands in the soil and babbling “Masood,” a small child’s approximation for “masu,” the word for water. The aquifer that his family used for drinking was far below this tree, a complex system of pipes and pumps concealed in an underground room that pulled water from a seep. 

Intrigued, his mother took him to several different houses and let him find their wells. When he had found five without fail she knew what he was, a Masu Ta’an, a giver of water. He was given two bracelets of deep blue lapis lazuli and a set of blown glass bottles, the symbol of his Clan for a child who could find water.

He was fortunate that he enjoyed this gift, not for the privilege that it afforded him—along with his water-finding ability he was born shy—but because it allowed him ample time to wade, swim, and experience the most important of resources on a hot planet. It was as if he were allowed an endless supply of gold or silver or dilithium, as were valued on other planets. 

Just as with the subterranean houses of Vulcan, cool air gathered in the low-pressure cup of earth. The sandstone had once opened only from above, where water had worn away the rock over millennia. Later, stone masons carved and created a staircase and tunnel with seven symbolic gates. These gates contained water incantations, prayers, and symbology. M’sharis pouring water forth from her breasts, water running down her long thighs. Her hands cupping her swollen belly with delight. 

His glance lingered on these carvings, and he looked from the goddess to Selde, already swaying through the final gate and into the basin of sand that ringed the pool. Her narrow waist, swelling hips. He imagined her flesh and tried to reconcile the woman with the goddess of stone. 

No one else was present at the spring, a small blessing that he gave thanks for with a small bow at the final M’sharis. Selde grinned and unpinned her braid, shook out her hair, which cascaded with a natural wave over her shoulders. Her paternal grandmother had been from Venezuela and had been known for her glorious hair; at her death she had passed down a carved wooden hair stick set with an enamel of Our Lady of Betania. Selde now took this from a pocket in her linen dress and reset her auburn hair into a loose bun at the nape of her long neck. Sendet could smell apricots. He blushed green along his cheeks and nose before he looked away.

The stone M’sharis seemed to wink at him in the failing light. 

He sat in the fine, damp sand and tugged at his boots, hoping to join his friend in the water, where she waded in. It swirled around her, streaming back in long Vs from her ankles whenever she took a stride. As she stepped deeper she lifted the hem of her dress, a deep green that would have highlighted her eyes, had she been facing him. Calves, knees, a hint of her thighs. She was slender yet compact, thick with muscle. Her training in Starfleet had required a physical component. 

Senet flinched as he stepped into the icy pool, which reflected the sandstone dome above them. Just as the gates had been carved, so too had the natural arch of the roof; here were constellations, set with calcite crystals; rust-colored pictographs of hands and water droplets; a primitive M’sharis with her prominent vulva and breasts. The masons and carvers that came later had honored the ancient painters and planned their art around these earlier tributes. Plush moss and fern-like plants softened the edges of the grotto, down at the waterline and against the far wall, where the water pulsed with changing subterranean pressures.

He bent to roll his trousers up to his knees as he drew deeper, closer to Selde. She paused just before the abyss that dropped off into the throat of the pool, a deep cavern that swallowed light into indigo darkness. She shivered, considering this passage into the earth. 

“The spring has been sounded to a depth of 501 meters,” she said, her voice low in her throat as if she might wake something sleeping. Enchanted by the undulation of dark water. “After that she joins the T’Priah Aquifer. But I suppose you knew that already.”

And here she did turn to grin at him, none of her earlier teasing to be found in the expression but instead a genuine fondness. 

“I did know,” he said, touched and wishing he could show it. He too kept his voice low, out of respect for the spring. “But it is good to hear from someone other than myself. A ‘pipe jockey,’ I believe you called me last night?”

Here her smile faded a little, and he knew the reference had been a mistake. Too flippitant, too irreverent in the face of her obvious admiration of the deep pool. Human humor had balances and limits that were mysteries. He made a fool of himself easily. He stared down at his feet, the light refracting and bending the contours of his flesh until he could not recognize his limbs as his own. 

Selde was saying something.

“Mm?” He tilted his head, regretting this second mistake. 

“I said ‘Penny for your thoughts.’” And here the gentle expression returned.

His thoughts? Senet stared at her pale hands with thick gathers of skirt in them, her strong thighs, the dark water behind them. The shallow bowl of her belly, the sharpness of her chin. 

“I was thinking of M’sharis.” The words tumbled from his mouth before he knew what he was going to say. 

He would have to meditate well tonight, deep draws of breath and koans of logic piled on top of one another to bury this feeling, this craving. No wonder his ancestors had turned to cool logic; his thoughts burned within him. 

“M’sharis was always a favorite of mine,” Selde said, withdrawing from the abyss ledge and wading to shallow waters. She kept her skirts high. “Anu, Nuakea, Demeter. She has names on my planet, too.” 

Senet watched water droplets rolling down her thighs, her calves. Spoke to her legs, unable to meet her eyes. “A favorite goddess of mine, as well. In my Clan she is called M’shiri. We do not have a spring as fair as this one, and the water is yet slightly brackish. Its flow rate is 1200 litres per second on the highest volume days.” There was refuge in science, a balm in mathematics. He calculated the volume of the V’Pret spring and found it to be nearly 2800 litres per second.

“When I was a kid Tolen and I would sneak down here at night, just to unwind from the day.” Selde walked ashore and dropped her skirts, her legs once again concealed to the ankle. “Once I stole two of Dr. Dakan’s clove cigarettes—he was a botanist from Kleinet III—and Tolen and I smoked them down here. Got sick as dogs because we didn’t know how to use the things, but we never said a word to our parents. I think Vanet knew, but he did not say anything directly. He’s a man of few words, that one, but has a mischievous streak all his own. He approached us the next day when we were sitting on the balcony, both of us green at the gills, and he started to talk about experimentation. ‘Hypotheses are interesting, are they not?’ he said, like he was talking to the dune-cedar tree and not to us. ‘One may discover that their hypothesis is correct, or one might discover that their hypothesis is wrong. Either way, a result is discovered, and knowledge such as this is invaluable.’ Then he smiled at us—smiled, Senet, the only time I ever saw him do so—and went on his way.”

“Were you ever discovered?”

“No.” She chuckled. “If we were, I never knew it. Maybe Vanet thought our obvious discomfort was enough of a conclusion. Anyway, we were smarter when we stole a bottle of Shiraz from a VSA-Starfleet symposium years later. We actually ate a full dinner before popping the cork. And speaking on which, I am hungry. Home?”

Senet followed, bending down to retrieve his boots on the way back to the M’sharis gates. He walked beside Selde this time, to feel the brush of her bare arm against the back of his scarred hand. He too, was hungry.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is part 3 of a 12-chapter story; I am experimenting with domestic or lesser-known dramas within the Star Trek universe. Lower Decks episodes and rich planetside cultures were always the most intriguing, aside from the adventures of Our Heroes.


	4. Bond

“I’ve never participated in a Vulcan wedding ceremony as an adult,” Selde said as she drew T’Vell’s modest, violet dress up onto her shoulders and fastened the back buttons, carved from an antique resin the color of plums. T’Vell drew the draping hood up to partially cover her hair, which Selde had helped her braid and pin to frame her lovely ears. “I vaguely remember you and Tolen at your Betrothal ceremony. There was this sage-like incense, a fire ring, a cup of mead-like stuff, and ceremonial gifts? I think?”

“It was a bride price. The V’Pret Clan ‘gifted’ the Masu-nikh Clan a sort of… dowry?”

“Reverse dowry,” Selde said, grinning. “Human cultures tend to be patrilineal, rather than matrilineal, like yours. There are some exceptions.” She glanced over at Senet, who sat cross legged on a cedar trunk that had once been Heather’s. It had been set in T'Vell supposed chambers in the south wing; she had retreated there to keep up the pretense of living with her brother before she was fully wed. 

Senet stared into the middle distance, not really seeing the two women at all. Half meditating, weighing his own life against his sister’s. T’Gris and he were nine years older but had not yet had their final Bonding at the place of Koon-ut-kali-fee. Thirty-four years was late, and it brought him uncomfortably—dangerously—close to a time that he did not wish to think about. His mouth and throat felt as dry as the Forge. He did not look forward to the event at all; he barely knew her. He knew more about the Human woman in front of him, more about her  _ deceased _ mother, than he did his own bride. It would be one thing if T’Gris were a disciple of Kolinahr; such emotional and physical remove was to be expected. But as far as he knew no one in her family had ever undertaken the rigors of the practice. He had even heard her father dismiss them as an obsolete order. 

A knock at the partition door drew him from his reverie. T’Vell answered and greeted their maternal cousins: Sedon, T’Vera, T’Minnet and her baby son Vekon. As he watched them stream in with semi-formal greetings he realized that Selde had come to his side and laid her cool hand on his. Her hands always seemed cool. Her blood sang at 37 degrees Celsius, his at 40.

“Looking a bit peaked there, son.” Her words were teasing but her face was grave. Voice low, caressing. Just for him. “Are you alright?”

He stared at her for a long moment, for he had been thinking in his native Vulcan language and he was out of practice transferring from one tongue to another. Selde’s green eyes said enough; she could see right through to the heart of him. Humans often seemed to respond to distress in ways that his people did not. They showed empathy, compassion, not just a pragmatic response to circumstance. How often had he seen a Vulcan man in the early stages of pon farr and every Vulcan around him seemed blind to his distress? His own father had spoken to the far wall when he told Senet of his pending Betrothal and why such an arrangement was necessary. Spat the words pon farr and plak tow as if they were filth, not meant to be spoken. Refused to answer his bewildered, boyish questions and left Senet with an abrupt command to meditate upon self control.

He turned his hand palm up and grasped Selde’s cool fingers with his own. The barest trace of a mind touch flowed between them:  _ concern, love, inquiry, are-you-sad-hurt-alone, thirsty-for-water, do-you-want-to-come-outside-with-me _ ?

“You should be with Tolen’s family,” he said, wishing he could take her up on her unvoiced offers. “The Clans may mingle before and after the ceremony, but you have to walk in with his.”

“Mingle with me then,” she whispered as she withdrew her hand. “Introduce me to your people so that they don’t think I wandered in from the tourist kiosks.”

He rose and made formal introductions with his cousins. They greeted Selde with typical Vulcan restraint, though they also sparked with mastered curiosity. Selde held the baby, who rooted about on her shoulder for milk. T’Minnet took him back and lowered the cowl neckline of her copper brown dress. Baby Vekon latched and suckled for milk with an industrious _mku_ _ -mku-mku _ sound, his fists curled tight against the breast. Senet glanced at Sedon, who watched his wife and firstborn with pride. 

Selde withdrew with a sisterly pat on T’Vell’s shoulder and followed Senet to the main hall. She drew her copper-colored shawl over her bare shoulders out of propriety, for Vulcan marriage ceremonies were considered among the most sacred. Her navy blue dress fell to her ankles. She wore a silver cuff bracelet on one wrist. 

Many guests packed the hall, almost all Vulcan, save for Amanda Greyson, on a rare solo appearance without Ambassador Sarek, and two Caitians, Drs. M’rrias and Rrell, who worked in the bio labs down the hall at the Academy. Two members of an obligate carnivore species who were trying to perfect meatless meats for Caitians who needed to live in the company of vegetarians.

Senet and Selde crossed the crowd, nodding and greeting, taking a moment with a friend or colleague. Most of Tolen’s family, native to ShiKhar and the surrounding regions, had previous experience with offworld peoples and were comfortable with their presence. Families like this were slowly turning insular Vulcan into an interstellar community. Young Vulcans were the vanguard of this movement, though some of their elders, like Ambassador Sarek, were pioneers of their own class. Senet’s Clan was more insular. Though they also lived in the Greater North Sea Basin, skirting the polar latitudes. The southernmost ancestral lands had only a glancing relationship with Caitians, Humans, or other “outworlders.” Again, the younger generations such as his maternal cousins, looked both forward and outward to change.

They found his parents standing on the small, upper balcony outside in the heavy evening heat. Assessing the sandstone cliffs, the grotto, the garden rich with desert flowers.

“Mother, Father. I greet you.” Senet bowed and held out his hands, palms turned upward toward his parents. “Dif-Tor heh Smusma.”

“Sochya eh Dif, my son.” His mother inclined her graceful head, her hair gone white and face thinner than he remembered. A hint of fondness glowed in her eyes, and the corner of her mouth quirked upward. She laid both of her hands in his, her palms down. His father did the same. Square-faced and bordering on portly, his hair remained jet black, his wide mouth and stern eyes not softening with any hint of familial bond.

“May I present my friend, Selde Bride.” Senet held up one hand palm up to Selde, who reached out with her hand palm down. Only the tips of their middle and ring fingers touched. It was a gesture of inclusion, one reserved for members of one’s family-by-marriage for formal greetings. It showed that Senet considered Selde his close friend, an honored position in Vulcan culture. “Selde is a foster daughter of T’Laet and Vanet of the V’Pret Clan, of the House of Surak. Selde, this is my mother T’Rol and my father Senon of the Masu-nikh Clan, of the House of Set.” 

“To call one friend and behave so close after knowing each other for only three quarters of a year is illogical,” Senon said, not looking at Selde at all. “Tell us news of your own Bonding day, Sa’fu Senet. Should it not be soon?”

Senet remained in place, unable to process what he had heard. His father had always been a man of blunt words, but this… He glanced at Selde, who composed her face into an icy calm, more-Vulcan-than-Vulcan, as she took her hand away and lowered it into a fist at her side. Senet glanced at his mother, who pretended to gaze back through the parted doors as if she had heard neither him nor his father. She nodded greeting across the inner balcony at a great aunt and excused herself. Her light blue dress rustled, cowl hood blending in with her white hair as if she were an apparition, rather than a living being. 

“You will contact T’Gris. It is shameful that T’Vell be wed before her elder brother.” Senon’s voice dropped into a silky, low pitch. Just for Senet to hear. 

Selde drew away. Warmth bleeding away from Senet’s side.

Senet’s blood roared up through him as though he were standing in flames; he clenched his jaw hard enough to hurt. “Father, you dishonor me and our family with your disregard. I demand apology for your ill-thought words and lack of manners toward an honored guest.”

Senon huffed, hands folding behind his back as he stared back as Senet as one would a small, wayward boy and not a fellow man of standing. “You may speak to me as an equal when you are wed and your wife is heavy with child. You lack experience, Senet. You do not see that our proud Vulcan race is becoming polluted with alien blood. Your mother-cousin T’Pring was right to reject such blood. Why her parents agreed to that arrangement I shall never understand. You shame yourself, Senet. Meditate upon self control and—”

The rest of his words trailed away as Senet turned and walked inside, his back straight with silent rage.

***

“...parted from me and never parted, never and always touching and touched.” Tolen spoke as he and T’Vell knelt before a circle of flame on the red sands of the Place of Marriage and Challenge. Family and friends stood in a semi-circle on either side of the temple arena, parents backing their children and siblings just behind. Tolen’s family was the more motley of the two parties gathered, for both Caitians and Humans belonged to this group. Selde had left the house next to Lady Amanda, but Senet had seen Tolen stride back and take her by the hand to the front of the procession, where she fell into line with T’Laet and Vanet. She now stood with her hands folded in front of her and watching the central pair with a soft expression. 

Senet strained to keep his eyes on T’Vell; his throat constricted against the bile in his belly at the memory of what his parents had done. He glanced past them at Selde again, and this time she met his eyes. A small, rueful smile warmed her eyes and her mouth flickered with the same. Senet breathed deep the scent of sulfur and sage-like incense, listened to the tinkling of copper chimes. T’Pau’s sonorous voice lifted above the crowd as T’Vell and Tolen withdrew their paired fingers from across the fire ring and touched the meld points on each other’s faces. They both closed their eyes in brief concentration—and joy, Senet knew—before rising to stand with paired fingers again.

The families began filing out of the arena, passing first the wedded couple and T’Pau. Each bowed in respect before the matriarch of the House of Surak. T’Pau inclined her head to each small group, including Lady Amanda, but her eyes lingered with coldness on the two Caitians and Selde, who trailed behind Vanet. 

Selde bowed her head in respect but with challenge in her eyes. T’Pau seemed to weigh this and find it good; she returned the slight bow with mutual respect.

_ One small grace _ , he thought to himself, and turned to follow his family out of the arena.

  
  


***

Senet found her standing up against one of the quarried stone walls, ShiKhar glittering silver on the horizon and warm wind blowing up from the desert far below. The scent of sage-like leaves and blue sharas flowers carried on the nighttime wind. Selde had taken her shoes off and stood barefoot on a warm sandstone dais that had once been a basin for water but now lay cracked after millennia of use. One of the green copper wind chimes hung nearby and rang in minor key when stirred by evening air. Mournful, soft.

Selde combed her fingers back through her auburn hair to free the knot above the cascade. Her gathered hair tumbled down around her bare shoulders. The constellation Virgo, inked in blue, peeked out from one embroidered sleeve. 

“Long day,” she said, seemingly at random, and Senet bowed his head when it became apparent that she was speaking to him.

“Indeed. I am sorry. I did not know you were addressing me.”

“I’m not undressing you.” An ironic quirk to her mouth as she glanced back at him. Stubborn, acid in her inflection. Her obstinate feint held more hurt than amusement and the humor fell flat. 

He stood beside her with his hands clasped behind his back, mouth dry, not knowing what to say. His parents had behaved dreadfully, his Clan matriarch with dishonor toward an invited guest, and T’Pau… He held great respect for the Matriarch of all Clans, and could understand her rationalization toward outworlders witnessing sacred Vulcan rites, but he could not excuse the coldness.

“I wish to apologize for my parents’ actions, Selde. I did not wish—”

“Don’t you dare apologize,” she said, rounding on him with tired anger in her eyes. “Not you. Their sin and pride do not belong to you, and you have nothing to apologize for.  _ Nothing _ . If you wish to give reparations you may; this is honorable. But do so while moving forward. Learn, show hospitality, listen, speak, act, see difference and embrace it, but do not couch this rift in backwards looking and apology. Apologies alone don’t do a damn thing, Senet.”

He met her eyes with a steady gaze, just as T’Pau had. A gaze of equals, a silent  _ I see and hear you _ . And slowly, Selde’s face relaxed. She gathered him into her arms, though she had to stand on tiptoe so that her forehead could rest against his shoulder. He held her for a long while, not “giving a damn” as a few knots of people passed by. 

Defiance in their union. 

***

They walked home together from the shuttle, the road and house empty, for T’Vell and Tolen would sleep for three days in the ceremonial Seclusion Hall near Koon-ut-kali-fee. In previous millennia the final Bonding always took place during the first pon farr, but this had faded as Vulcans spread across the planet and out into the galaxy. Convenience, familial arrangements, space travel, love, desire, a want for children now drove and dictated the final ceremony. 

“...and so it was not just anger for myself. It’s the overreaching bigotry that infuriates me,” Selde was saying. Strolling, choosing her words carefully as she held her soft boots in one hand and watched her pale feet glowing in the starlight. “I did not know Commander Spock well; he was both First Officer and the Chief Science Officer. But I spoke with Dr. McCoy often. He let slip some of the things that Spock had to endure as a child and as a young man. Spock was ostracized and taunted with pseudo-logic, the same kind of bigotry that people like Aristotle used to ‘prove’ that women were inferior to men.

“You said your father spoke of pollution. He meant mixing races, mixing ideas, mixing tradition. How shameful for him that supposed ‘purity’ is his ideal. What he wants is stagnation. We can honor our differences and become stronger for them. Change  _ will _ emerge where it is warranted; to fight against it is like trying to keep the sun from the sky.” Selde sighed and swallowed hard. Thinking of a small child cast into a hostile sea of society and culture, the weight of other people’s fear set like an anchor upon his tiny shoulders. 

Senet was silent for a long while and followed after her as they descended into the cool, still house. Long sighs of nocturnal pel’ir insects sang out in the hollows of the garden. 

“Adherence to tradition is something that I too, have reflected upon,” he said. He did not give voice to what he truly felt, for the words  _ frustration _ and  _ fear _ did not come easily to him. “T’Vell’s Bonding this evening was… I have a responsibility of my own: my wife, T’Gris.”

Selde nodded, her face in profile. Again looked down to her feet so that her hair curtained her eyes. 

“My father gave me a directive to contact her, and though I disagree with him on many subjects, I do have to honor the marriage I entered into as a child.” Senet said this with a quiet certainty that he did not feel. He had seen loveless bondings, cold-bed marriages. They were not acknowledged openly but there were Vulcan adults who chose to live with the families of their birth rather than with a spouse, husbands and wives who came together in the ceremonial Seclusion Houses once every seven years or whenever they desired a child. Men who lived with friends and women who joined sisterhood monasteries until their husbands needed them. These were not the majority of Vulcan marriages, but they were a high enough percentage not to be uncommon. “I shall contact T’Gris in the morning.”

Silence lay heavy over both of them as the pel’ir sang. Light from Vulcan’s sister-planet seeped through the westernmost windows and fell down the walls in slow cascades. 

Selde twined her arms about her own shoulders, and Senet’s heart twisted in his side. Her arms empty where they had held him, only hours earlier.

“Then I release you,” she said, seemingly to the pools of night that still shadowed the cool air around her. She turned her back and disappeared into the darkness.


	5. Crossing

An indigo blue bowl of morning yet lay over the planet, late stars wet as dew. Dark junipers shivered in the sweet wind. Selde pulled her auburn hair into a braid at the base of her neck and bent to make sure her shoes were clasped well. Her legs glimmered, pale against the darkness beneath her green shorts. Arms shielded from advancing sunlight by a sleek grey shirt with an SPF of 65. The UV-blocking lenses she wore in her eyes and broad sun hat would shield her from Vulcan’s brutal sun. She carried enough water for the day out and in; she and her friend Sesa had planned to hike together into the rocky desert between the Hills and the North Sea.

A hum from the road heralded the auto-shuttle, and soon Sesa stood beside her, a silhouette in the dark.

“I would say ‘good to see you,’ but…” Sesa trailed off, wry humor in her voice. 

“I can see you already. Give it a few minutes.” Selde enveloped the Vulcan woman in her arms. She smelled of cloves, honey, something warm and spicy. Her friend wore linen shorts. She also wore a logo shirt for Coca-cola and a baseball cap with the Starfleet Warp Coils topping her head. Probably to make her Human friend laugh; Sesa had a knack for performative humor. 

The two women shouldered their packs and set off, trading small talk once their eyes had fully adjusted to the predawn light. Hours yet to go. Here and there comfortable silences punctuated their speech; they had known each other for years, meeting when Selde was fifteen and frustrated by the chafe of Vulcan society. She had noticed S’Lira Sesa of the Korsovaya House while crossing the markets one winter, the tall woman wearing a black dress that dipped lower across her shoulders than the high-necked lines that most Vulcans favored. Her hair bobbed and sleek around her winging ears. Eyes of a warm honey brown, their lids heavy with violet shadow. A deep green tattoo in the shape of a peony-like v’los flower bloomed between her shoulder blades and highlighted her warm copper skin. Heather, noticing Selde’s fascination, had bent to her daughter’s ear and whispered that the woman was an Ashaya’riv. A woman who never married, yet who knew many men. 

Selde had not asked any further questions, for she understood the insinuation in the word “knew.” On Earth, the word was archaic, used to connote sexual intercourse. As far as she had known at the time, Vulcans were always monogamous and always married. That this woman with the self-assured stride and proud face would “know” men without being bonded was intriguing. There was an air of taboo about the concept, even as the crowds honored the woman with head bows and greetings as though she were a High Priestess of Gol.

For three weeks Selde would loiter around the markets and search for this stunning woman, looking for the curve of bare shoulders and heavy eyelids. 

It was Sesa who found  _ her _ . 

“I seem to have found a shadow,” Sesa had said, in a voice warmed with amusement. “I have heard that you were looking for me.”

Selde had the good grace to blush at the time; she had casually inquired of several shopkeepers and security personnel about “the lady with the black dress” while miming a collar that fell off-shoulder. The universal reaction was passionless chastisement; let people go about their business, child.

As it turned out, Sesa had noticed Selde and Heather, too. The first Humans she had seen, though the sight was now a common one on-planet. She wanted to meet the young woman with the green eyes. 

Sesa had been delicate about her position in Vulcan culture for a long time, while Selde visited her in her jeweler’s studio and fetched polished stones, coils of metal, and pliers. While they spoke she made herself useful pulling wire through gauges and grinding cabochons. Helped organize Sesa’s hammers and horn anvils. Over time, as their small talk and cultural exchanges matured, Sesa spoke about her role in the House of Kursovaya. 

“You know of the taboos in Vulcan society,” Sesa had said one morning as they sorted garnets for a three-strand necklace. “The Time of which most of my people do not speak.”

“Yes. Pon farr,” Selde had said, a shiver of audacity burning up her spine.

“Yes. Pon farr.” Sesa’s fine lips curved, the upper peaked and more complex than the lower. They made for a beautiful one-sided smirk. “Women of the House serve an important role within our society. We shed Clan and family by choice from a young age, and if any of us had entered into a childhood marriage it is nullified. Our purpose—and it is important for all people to have purpose—is to serve our people by lying with men who have no spouse, through death or divorce or distance. Unanswered pon farr is deadly for Vulcan men; an unfortunate flaw within my people’s biology. Some call my Sisters and I ‘katra hakausu,’ soul-healers. We save the body so that the spirit may live.”

“Then for you sex is a spiritual thing?” Selde had asked, relieved to discuss the subject so frankly after years of her mother’s whispered words. 

“Somewhat. You will understand better once you have had sex,” Sesa had said, smirking again at Selde’s burning red ears. “The term on your planet would translate to ‘sacred prostitute,’ or more accurately, ‘geisha.’ My Sisters and I are considered artists of both body and craft, hence the metalwork. Some of us weave, some carve, some compose words or songs. It is a small society, and we do not always have… bath’ri… this is difficult to translate exactly. We do not always have ‘clients.’”

“Johns?” Selde had asked. 

“If that is what you mean by men-who-have-intercourse-with-women-to-avoid-death, then yes.”

They had been unable to find a suitable term. 

Now, crossing the desert before dawn, they traded stories of the years that had passed since they had seen one another; Sesa had been with her family since Selde came planetside.    


The sun came up just as they reached their destination, an ancient ruin that had once been a city of thousands. It had been abandoned in the querulous Pre-Reformation years when cyanide bombs destroyed the wells. Before the ensuing conflagration the city of Re’llikah had existed for four thousand years. Some of the stone buildings remained, reduced to hulks and shells. 

This was not their final destination. The two women rested a while and broke a few grain rations. Selde pointed out a tiny etta bird, hovering and dipping her long beak into fluted flowers that bloomed yellow along a stone wall. 

“Nest nearby,” Sesa said, standing again and readying to leave. “She had white brood feathers along her gorget and belly, did you notice?”

“I did. Speaking of which, how is your little girl?” Selde asked as she followed Sesa up a winding trail toward sandstone layers jutting up from the desert floor. 

“Shelby is well. About to turn seven.” She had chosen her daughter’s name from a Human language, meaning “willow grove,” for the trees that indicated underlying water. It was also an oblique honor to her friend, whose name sounded similar. “She nurtures a talent for painting and botany, so she is taking after her ‘godmother.’”

“Will she enter the Kursovaya order?”

“No. But neither will I choose a mate for her, either. Shelby will make her own destiny.” Sesa pointed with her chin toward a lava flow cave unfolding behind an arette of sandstone. “There. Petroglyphs from the Trell Era. They are a rediscovery, found by archaeologists only two years ago. It is doubtful that the people of Re’llikah knew about them, for there were three untouched tombs. Two women and one infant. The people have been re-interred, but their artifacts have been taken to the VSA for scanning and replication. Once they are made anew the originals will be reburied. Until then, we may visit to pay our respects and see the artifacts displayed in the Reliquary Hall. I thought it would be good to honor the women and child first, then perhaps we can visit their belongings next week?”

Selde trotted a little faster through the juniper trees. Excited to see the caves; archaeology was a hobby of hers, born out of a visit to the Egyptology wing of the Los Angeles Museum. One of the rare times she had met her father, Alejandro Virga, who had been a linguistic researcher. They kept in touch only sporadically; she had been born as the result of a summer love, sweet and brief. 

The lava cave descended beneath a pocked contact layer of sandstone, fossilized dunes that had drifted and lithified during Vulcan’s fitful geological eras. Selde’s UV contact lenses were a liability here in this earthy darkness, and she was grateful when Sesa pressed an electric torch into her palm. 

They picked their way across an uneven floor of solidified lava, the grey-black stones sharp and covered with thin moss in the deepest points. Cold air exhaled from fissures in the walls and curled back down from the vaulted ceilings. Like breath, a living cave.

“Up,” Sesa said, again pointing with her chin. 

They climbed an aluminum ladder tinted with an alloy to make it blend in with the surrounding rock. Emerged into an upper chamber formed by an air pocket. There, on a carved dais, lay three wrapped mummies in brittle linquot cloth. One woman’s wrist had come out through an unraveled strip. The infant, wholly swaddled, lay curled on her desiccated belly. This chamber remained dry and closer to the surface; heat radiated faintly from the jagged ceiling.

A few petroglyphs lined the walls in red ochre. Hand prints, drops of rain, grasses, grains, the extended wing of the sha’vokh bird. The Vulture Guardian of the dead. 

“Here,” Sesa said, kneeling near a niche. “This is why I wanted to bring you here.”

Selde joined her and knelt in awe. A fired clay jar stained by grey char sat in the niche. Round and rich with grains. Mut grass. 

“It is an ancient strain, rediscovered.” Sesa whispered, respecting the sleep of the dead behind them. 

Selde did not tell her that Senet had already told her of this news, and in fact he had secured an advanced sample of the grains, once they were cloned and available for distribution. A gift she looked forward to; it was only a sweet coincidence that Sesa had brought her here. The thought of Senet seared her heart anew, and for the remainder of the tomb pilgrimage grief lay heavy on her throat. She was not yet sure what she felt for him; he was beautiful enough, with his sensual voice, soft brown eyes, the way he held his hands when drinking tea with her. There was love, yes. Love in his acts: the gift of grains; his attempts at Human humor; the gift of a paper wall hanging with an ancient Vulcan poem about wind in tall grasses, written in calligraphy. But whether she felt love for him beyond friendship was difficult to gauge; her mother had been ill-suited for relationships and thus had few, and most of the people her age on Vulcan had grown up knowing their destinies in marriage. She had seldom seen or experienced courtship. Sex was easy enough. But emotion, vulnerability, chance… These were disquieting.

Vulcan divorce was rare before the first pon farr; honoring the lines of family and arranged marriages were deeply important. Reaffirmation of old alliances. Honor. The weight and authority of an entire planet’s worth of people was a hard habit to break; Sesa’s decision not to bond her daughter to a mate was slightly subversive but part of a growing trend. But for people like Tolen, T’Vell, and Senet the cement of Clan and culture was set. There was no easy social pattern for leaving a marriage if a more suitable partner was found before the final Bonding. T’Pring’s declaration of Challenge was an unprecedented act in the modern era; Kali-fee had not been demanded in at least six hundred years.

Sesa and Selde returned to Pret long after nightfall, their legs dusty and the trailed end of a private joke fading under the stars. They said farewell in a subdued manner, for there were several people left on the shuttle. Selde stepped off into the sweet night air and waited until the shuttle was out of sight. 

She took a moment to stand in the dark. Light from the great hall below the tinted windows. Senet sat at a small table with a tangle of silver kal-toh sticks in front of him. His fingers tented together, face composed. By the look of him he had been sitting there for some time, as the kal-toh was yet within its opening gambit. T’Vell, returned that morning from the Seclusion Halls, stopped and spoke to him, her muffled words drifting up against the glass. Senet did not move, but he murmured something against his hands. 

T’Vell placed a gentle hand on his shoulder before disappearing down the illuminated hallway leading to her and Tolen’s rooms. The light faded, and Senet was left in quiet darkness. 

After she was sure they would be alone, Selde entered the house and walked down the curved stairwell. Senet glanced up through his eyelashes; he looked tired, his face pale. He said nothing; whereas the silences between them had been comfortable, this one was weighted with both question and resignation. It occurred to Selde that Senet had not said one word about his wife, beyond her name and the fact that he was married to her.

Touch. Telepathic Vulcans reserved touch for close intimacy alone: family, spouse, children, close friends. Any relationship that fell out of these circles remained almost touch-free, unless the Vulcan in question was some form of Healer. That Senet touched her, either in embrace or holding her hand, was a message that she fell somewhere within those circles of intimacy.

She approached him and laid a hand on his shoulder. He did not move. Then, slow, as with hesitation, he lay his hand over her own. Again, the briefest touches of telepathic communication flitted between them:  _ concern, fear-hesitation, abandonment-despair-coldness, love, inquiry, desire, please-do-not-go, are-you-alone _ ?

What came out of her mouth was: “Has T’Gris replied to your inquiry?”

“No.” A hardness to his voice, the faintest hint of a growl, and through their touching hands came again the feeling of  _ abandonment-despair-coldness.  _ He noticed the exchange and pulled his hand away, steepled his fingers. 

Selde waited, trembling at the strength of this psychic burr. She wanted to sweep into his lap and hold him as one might an injured… friend? lover? But the curve of his shoulders bunched beneath her fingers, and she withdrew. 

They remained still as the light from T’Kuhl pulled away up the walls. Aware of each other’s warmth, ache, desire, the quiet rise and fall of one another’s breath.


	6. Pilgrimage

On Earth, blue herons stand with their wings partly open and throats fluttering when they become too hot in meadow sun. Selde stood on a sandstone ridge high above the house and spread her arms to greet the dawn, her body already smelling of warm baked bread and sweat. Shaking away dreams of the night before, in which her mouth was full of words that she could not speak. In spite of her fitful sleep she felt that she had been granted some sort of reprieve; T’Gris had contacted Senet with one brief text message: they would Bond once the monsoon season had passed and summer turned to autumn. Three months yet away.

She looked over the village Pret, stirring under the light of the new sun. Several children made their way to school; even from this distance she could see the bright blue satchels that they slung across their shoulders. She also noted that Senet stood on the lower balcony, the stone fire pit flickering. A pot of soup over the flames, steam like a banner on the air.

“Bless you,” she said to his faraway form, knowing that he could not hear her even with his Vulcan sensitivity. She pulled her shoes back on and thumbed the strap; only sun-seared sand could keep the damn things on her feet.

As she drew near the house the smell of miso soup drifted through the dune-cedars.

“Good morning,” Senet said in his purring voice, holding out a cup of steaming black tea. He nodded at a copper tray set with simple white bowls that she herself had thrown while yet in secondary school. “I thought this would be a good change from our usual croissants.”

“With thanks,” Selde took the cup and softened her formal words with a smile. 

Silence still lay awkward between them, and they both privately missed the presence of Tolen and T’Vell, who were in Seclusion. Selde found several sentences dying in her mouth that acknowledged their absence; she found the Vulcan taboos surrounding sex to be puritanical and foolish, but cultural diplomacy and her respect for the man before her left her silent. She made due with a contented sigh over the hot tea and soup, the earthy taste of miso and tang of seaweed. 

Senet too, seemed to be trying to fit himself in their new, lonely pairing. He opened his mouth twice before taking a long drink of broth, then swirling the soup meditatively. He kept to himself what he felt when hearing the news from T’Gris, but his attempts at coolness toward Selde kept blooming toward warmth. He still practiced Human teasing and suggested that they attend  _ The Winter’s Tale _ by the Vulcan Royal Shakespeare Company. He had gazed at her in the dark theatre and leaned in when a great bear skeleton, clattering and horrific, chased Antigonus across the stage.  


Yellow and silver rak birds hopped in the evergreen that curved her ancient branches over the house. Soft trills of the waking males and a chirps from the females, grown now after fledging in early summer. One of the crested males extended his knifelike wing for preening, while the other bobbed his head and fluttered his wing tips, nascent moves in a courting dance that he would use when he came of age. His sisters, too close for genetic interest, groomed their feet and grasped at the blue-green berries of the evergreen. Not knowing to be afraid of the two bipeds before them, one of the males hopped down into the red flagstones and pecked at the remnant of an insect, just a shell left over from molt. The rak picked it up and scissored one leg off with his beak before spitting it out, dismayed at the lack of meat. 

Selde watched with amusement, noting the blush-colored dots just behind his eyes in the growing light. A soft peal of copper bells echoed over the Hills, calling the doulas and midwives of M’sharis. Someone must be in labor. Biorhythms seemed to love early mornings and late nights.

She did not long for motherhood, but she understood its appeal. 

The male rak bird chirped alarm when it realized that it had hopped close to her dusty ankle, and all four birds flew away. Like loosed arrows, on the dawn.

She noticed that Senet was staring at the dark line under the turquoise-bead anklet, where her sweat had traced. She drew her feet beneath her long green dress and stood, the copper-thread shawl that T’Vell had given her falling from her shoulders. 

“What shall we do with our newfound freedom?” Selde asked, suppressing a smile at Senet’s twitch of surprise. Doe-eyed, startled, clutching his bowl of soup as though he forgot how it worked.

“I assume you are referring to the current summer holiday,” Senet said, smoothing his expression into the usual Vulcan calm. Delicate, deflecting from the reason that they were alone and would be for the next ten days. Only his voice caressed. “We may choose to go into work, but may I suggest a different approach?”

“Please.”

“My Clan often makes pilgrimage to the Shrine of T’Gil during the summer rains, and though ShiKhar and surrounding areas are forecast for high pressure systems, the Shrine is forecasted for the yearly monsoons. Would you like to accompany me on the journey?”

“Is that allowed?” Selde kept her face neutral and tone light, but she had had enough experience with Vulcan xenophobes to know that an invitation from one open-minded individual was not a guarantee that others would be so welcoming. ShiKhar was a major city, and people in the Khar Basin had enough exposure to outworlders. However, there were several places on the planet that she would not choose to venture.

“You are indeed most welcome. The Shrine of T’Gil is visited not only by my Clan but several others, and it is located close to the city of ShiKohm. It is known to visitors.” Senet chose his words carefully and held her gaze. He too remembered his people’s criticism at Selde’s presence for the Bonding. His throat clenched with anger at the memory of it before he reached for mastery. “ I would… enjoy… showing you the traditions of my Clan; you would be my honored guest.”

Selde searched his eyes, the deep brown with heterochromia of bronze at each pupil. A desert dweller, born and bred, with a green oasis for a heart. She shook her head at the maudlin image, and Senet took this for refusal. He blinked, dismay flitting across his face as quick as a rak’s wing.

“Oh! No, I was shaking my head at myself. Yes, I would love to come with you, Senet. Honored.” 

Relief, soft about his eyes. “I thank you.”

“Is there anything special we do? Head coverings, offerings, or?” 

“Not officially. My Clan does provide a living for the Keepers of the Shrine, but we also take offerings of seeds for the gardens there, or mollusk shells for the soil. T’Gil is a fertility goddess of a different sort, one for agriculture, which is why I expressly wanted to take you. You will need to cover your arms,” and here his gaze slid from her bare bicep to her slender wrist. “But so shall I. Head coverings are optional; again, the Shrine is known to offworld visitors. ...ShiKohm included it in their tourism brochures.”

Selde laughed at this, a sudden peal that rang full from her throat. An uncommon sound, on Vulcan. Senet craved to hear it.

“Well, then, I’ll get some mollusks at market tonight. Or shall we set off today?”

“Tomorrow will suffice. I need to check the status for the ShiLanar Infrastructure update.”

“And my enriched tikh seeds are currently in status, ‘til Tolen returns from his honeymoon.” Selde chose not to notice Senet’s startled expression at this glancing mention of a taboo. “I’ll pack and get the mollusks for dinner.” She stood to carry her empty bowl indoors, holding her hand out for his. Her fingers brushed over his own as he handed her the bowl, and a brief, thin link of telepathic contact sent her heart pounding hard in her chest. Senet likewise twitched and let the bowl go with haste. They went inside in silence, each wanting to say something but not knowing where the other stood.

  
  


***

Senet lay on his back, watching the water above him percolating, jewelled with bubbles. The transparent aluminum cistern was the final stage in water recycling; oxygen and other needed nutritive chemicals pumped through before it surged up water pipes and out taps, spigots, into basins and public fountains. All water that flowed at the surface was drinkable; it was not uncommon to see a person scooping a glass or bottle into a fountain mid-walkway. He missed the public fountains in winter, when everyone went above ground again. Only sand sculptures and gardens then, the ones that Selde said reminded her of the Zen gardens of Japan and others in the United States of Asia. 

The water tanks were his favorite retreat after all of his tasks had been completed; usually only he and a handful of other technicians crawled in the spaces beneath to perform visual checks and diagnostics, making sure that everything was in working order. Dim, cool, light wavering and flitting through exotic colors of blue, violet, greens, silver, platinum, and sometimes copper and gold. He knew, now that he had lived in Pret, that this environment was womblike. Comforting, conducive to meditation and sleep. He watched the litres of water swirl, deep and cool. Trying to cool his own head.

He was married. He had to remember. A childhood Bond to T’Gris, she of the Lance Clan of the House of T’Poza. A valuable match, for intermarriage between his Clan and hers had been taking place for millennia, carefully charted through family trees and tradition for optimal breeding of optimal children. 

Companionship was secondary in many Vulcan marriages, which is why Vulcans prized friendship so highly; men were allowed to be flanked by their closest friends at their final Bonding, women participating in women-only ceremonies and rituals every year during the Harvest season, and again on the winter Solstice. Mysteries that men could only guess at, unless they had such close companionship with their wives. Like Tolen and T’Vell. Made for each other, as Selde had said. Soulmates, the Split-aparts of Earth legend.

Selde. 

Again.

Senet found himself craving: her friendship, her laugh, her curiosity tempered with understanding, her silences that prompted his speech, the way she listened to him fully when he spoke. The small, thoughtful gifts she gave him, such as the Egyptian game of Senet. She had explained the coincidence and delight had burned within his heart. He had admired and caressed the cool green soapstone from which it had been carved. 

He enjoyed how her flaws vexed him: her too-quick temper and speech peppered with obscenities that she thought she kept tucked away under her breath. Her criticism of Vulcan culture that he too shared, in part. The soil that dusted up her bare legs and her distaste for shoes. He found himself looking for the tracks that she left when she came indoors, a pad of heel, ghost of high arch, the five round toes. Her habit of leaving half-full glasses of water on the piano bench, a bookshelf, and inexplicably, on the top shelf of his bureau.

T’Gris was… 

She was. 

Cool to the point of cold. A student of transcription, she copied calligraphy from ancient Vulcan spiritual texts onto vellum for shrines, maturation ceremonies, funerals and other rites. The few times they had met since their childhood Betrothal he had tried to make conversation in an effort to know her better. Noticed the black stains on the fingers of her right hand that had become permanent because of the perpetual fall of ink. Complimented her fine hand on the approach strokes. Asked her how she made her inks; charred llal’en or dune-cedar? T’Gris had answered with quick, one- or two-word answers, a smattering of sentences. He had surmised that she preferred to dwell within an inner world, the perpetual scholar’s love of silence and concentration. When he had tried the same inquiries along the telepathic pathways of their bond, she had flinched as if struck and rounded on him with an icy expression. Flat rage in her eyes. Senet had apologised aloud and taken his leave. For the rest of his time at her parents’ house he had behaved as a temporary guest, rather than a son-in-law. Made breakfast. Meditated with her father on invitation only, rather than assuming his presence welcome at dawn t’laer meditations. No one had said a word. T’Gris included.

He was certain their marriage was a contract between Clans, nothing more.

Not for the first time he felt that Vulcan society at large was an isolating one. There were some variations; Tolen’s progressive family, welcoming of offworlders and debates on what constituted logic. A welcome sanctuary. They were not disciples of T’Vet or V’tosh ka’tur, who embraced emotion, but they were tolerant of emotion. He noted that Tolen openly smiled, albeit in a subdued manner, when Selde said something mildly profane. Teasing was common. He had seen Tolen elbow her in the side to highlight some private joke that passed between them. T’Vell seemed to thrive with her husband, and their affection was open. She had even begun to tease Selde and Senet, prodding gently at their foibles. Selde’s many discarded tea pods, Senet’s scuffed boots. 

Boots. He needed to ready his pack and meet Selde for dinner. He scooted out awkwardly from beneath the cistern and rolled to his feet. Tabbed the seam of his black coveralls to open and stepped out before climbing the metal stairs.

He met Selde standing outside of his office and almost smiled at the sight. 

“I wanted to be sure these were what we were talking about,” she said as she reached into a woven bag the color of a sunset. She pulled out a bivalve with a rumpled brown shell the size of her hand. “Inlet Mollusks, right? The kind with the violet stripe on the shell? The compy said they are best for garden soil. Just grind them up.”

“That is correct.” Senet thumbed the keypad. “I will make them for you, if you wish, since you retrieved them.”

“We already have lemons at home. Garlic and parsley?”

“Yes. Sautéed in Rhombolian butter.”

“You eat them.”   


“I do, though they are a rare delicacy.” He picked up one of the shells, testing its weight in his hand. Thought of the succulent flesh within, the warmth of oil and herbs. How he craved them.


	7. Worship

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter rated M for mature.

The Shrine of T’Gil lay within a labyrinth of fossilized dunes and grabens, each with a thread of stream that swole to raging torrents during the monsoon season. In previous eras, braving flash floods to reach the shrine was proof of faith. In the modern era Vulcans embraced science; an antigrav walkway of transparent aluminum hung safely suspended over the main pilgrim-way and relayed information when certain panels were stepped upon. 

“...common offerings include water and ground shells of bivalves,” a woman’s voice murmured from hidden speakers in Vulcan monotone or solicitous Standard as Senet led Selde down a wide corridor of golden and red sandstone. A spindle-thin arch framed the northern mountains and behemoth thunderclouds, lumbering west. “Incense made from v’lil flower bark is traditional.”

“LUCKily, we have brought BI-vaalvves,” Selde said in imitation of the woman’s accented Standard. She carried the green cloth which held them near her breast. As per Senet’s suggestion, she had embroidered the offering sack shut with yellow and gold threads on the tramway ride across the salt flats and Prel’shi Hills. The train had skimmed on a shallow, seasonal sea left by recent deluges, and darts of sunlight on water leapt and swam like tiny silver fish. He had also brought a small envelope of v’lil incense, a smoky-sweet scent that reminded Selde of black cherries and cinnamon. She also embroidered a head of wheat, calling it cross-cultural goodwill.

“When I was a child my family brought bolts of linquot fabric as an offering. The Keepers are women who wear pale green robes and a belt of bronze links to represent grain at harvest. Not that Vulcan has much of an autumn or spring,” Senet said, thinking that he would like to see his friend wear similar. Or watch a light green dress hanging open from her bare shoulders.

“Pumpkins and apples and pears. When I take you to Earth we shall go at harvest time, Senet. I think I’d like to see you wear jeans and flannel while we went on a hayride.” Selde chuckled.

Senet gave her a startled glance; it unsettled him how often their thoughts aligned. He often found himself thinking something that she gave voice to. What to eat, where to travel, a patch of sunlight that vexed him in his bed on summer mornings. He calculated for coincidence and found an overwhelming correlation between himself and Selde that ruled out mere chance. T’Vell and Tolen behaved in a similar manner. He was unsure if this was cause for hope.

Several pilgrims and tourists mingled on the final ascent through a hanging wash, a group of Humans with a toddler among them. Her small legs pumped against the sand, and a few raindrops from an advancing storm sparkled in the pigtail puffs atop her head. Senet fell into a slow stroll behind them to watch the little girl, who took a brilla leaf from an overhanging branch and tried to stuff it into her mouth. Her father jumped to rescue her from the broad-leaf herb and looked at Senet in silent question.

“The brilla plant is quite safe,” he said, allowing a small smile at the man and child to communicate reassurance. She grinned back, brilliant and without modulation. She clamped to her father’s side with chubby legs and greedy fists. “It is used in soup broth, but it is bitter on its own. She may want a drink of water or milk to wash the taste away.”

“Thanks, man,” the father said, jiggling the little girl with affection. His voice lilted with a subtle Jamacian accent. “April, she is a fearless one. Sometimes a good thing, sometimes a bad one.”

“April is a scientist,” Senet said, with a slight bow at the child. Conscious also, of Selde standing nearby with an amused tilt to her head. “The trees, vines, and plants that line the final approach to the Shrine are all edible, but some require expert preparation. If she wishes to sample some of the Vulcan flora ask one of the Keepers; they will show her the correct parts of the plant to take.”

“Any berries? She loves blueberries.” 

“Several, though not of the Blue variety.” He held out the envelope of v’lil incense. “Please take this and give it to the Keepers. I am Senet, a Son of the Masu-nikh Clan, which is one of the Shrine’s historical patrons. If you give this to them they will escort you as special guests.”

“Thank you, Senet. This is extra special; our first time on Vulcan. The Masoo-neek Clan, right?” The man held April toward Senet, and she took the paper packet with one small hand.

“Correct.” Senet did not correct the man’s pronunciation; it was close enough. 

“Thanks again. Come on, ‘Rilly. Let’s go find Da.” The man kissed his baby and walked back to his group. 

His husband gave him an amused kiss on the cheek and nodded with gratitude to Senet. “Kamsahamnida. Thank you.”

“That was sweet of you,” Selde said, her voice low as they walked ahead.

“If Vulcan is to be a better neighbor in an interstellar community we need to be open to new people and experience,” Senet said, unaware that personal metaphor lay couched in his declaration. “I have been meditating upon this subject for the last few months since Tolen’s and T’Vell’s Bonding. My family may philosophize differently, but my own break with tradition must be clear. If children such as April and my own may freely learn from each other, then Vulcan can be a better neighbor.

“However, a question. What did April’s other father say? ‘Kamsahamnida.’ I am unfamiliar with Earth languages.”

“He said ‘thank you’ in Korean. You got the formal expression of gratitude, one of honor.”

“Ah. So another form of cultural exchange?”

“Exactly. He recognized what you were giving his family by giving them the incense, and he thanked you accordingly.”

The Shrine of T’Gil loomed before them in another natural stone grotto, tall rather than wide. The altar and image of T’Gil stood tiny in the bottom of the hollow, which was shaped like a head of grain by coincidence of rain and wind. The goddess raised her broad face to the sky and offered the sun handfuls of bronze grain. A blue-green robe made of linen-like cloth swayed in the wind around the stone statue. At her feet lay real shells and golden pearls from the nearby sea. Bronze bells on spindle chains hung from the top of the arched sandstone and tinged in low-pressure winds from the advancing storm. Sunlight dimmed as Selde and Senet approached, and they stepped under an overhang of rock just as the first true rain fell. A good omen, said one of the Keepers as she ushered several groups back in from the open canyon, with reassurances that the hanging wash would not flood. Selde caught sight of the baby April and her fathers. One of them handed the matronly Keeper the packet of incense with a nod in Senet’s direction. The Keeper inclined her head in thanks and knelt to the girl, offered her hand. April toddled forth to grasp it and the trio followed the woman in green under an ornate arch toward a sheltered garden.

“Lucky wee girl,” Selde said, after a pair of young Keepers walked by and accepted her bag of shells. 

“When I was small the Keepers would pay special attention to children,” Senet said. “They sometimes gave us woven baskets of v’xin berries. The ones akin to your blackberries, on Earth. Other times they gave cuttings of v’pret or minnet vines, the ones with edible flowers. There are several yet growing in my mother’s garden from these pilgrimages.”

They pressed against the rutted sandstone wall and watched gathering rain begin to cascade off of the slickrock on the other side of the wash. A canal, cleverly hidden, caught the water and funneled it into the box canyon below. Thunder rumbled in the throat of the storm, and lightning flashed violet with proximity. Senet circled Selde’s wrist with his warm hand and pulled her with him, weaving past crowds and into a narrow passage latticed over with thick wooded vines. A place where members of the patron Clans could go, open to others only when they presented a seal of permission. It was a concession to the more traditional members of Vulcan when ShiKohm wanted to attract more tourists and settlers inside its borders. Senet and Selde bowed to a pair of Keepers who sat at either side of an octagonal doorway made from dune-cedar. The women, white-haired and wrinkled with dignified age, bowed in return. The woman on the left wrapped her shawl tighter and greeted Senet personally; a great-great-grandaunt. Her violet-brown eyes regarded Selde with a veiled warmth, and she bade her welcome. 

Selde, touched by the gesture, bowed deep in a way that she had not with T’Pau. Her respect was the same, but this ancient woman needed no challenge. She was content in her last few summers.

Beyond the doorway lay a natural cave of sandstone, high and the color of honeyed bread. Several smaller passages wound at intervals into the upper desert. Small tables sat on the tile floor in front of each doorway. Senet led her through one, explaining that the lanterns were lit when pilgrims entered for meditation. He thumbed the switch to light the hexagonal glass lamp, tinted golden, before they continued up the passage. 

A small room with a high ceiling and round window lay at the end, a simple bed along one wall, a padded meditation bench along the other. A wool rug lay in the middle, its fibers dyed the same soft gold as the lamp, and the smell of rain curled richly through the glassless window. Wooden shutters of polished cedar hung open, but Senet reached back to draw a thick woolen curtain in front of the doorway passage. 

They stood in silence before the window, which looked north out over a slickrock desert with junipers growing gnarled and tenacious from deep fissures. Ink-blue storm clouds piled up and dimmed the earth. Sheets of rain swept toward the shrine, and blue lightning stabbed at the earth.

Senet pressed his hand to Selde’s as she stood beside him, palm to palm, the tips of his fingers flushed green and curling down over her smaller ones. He could smell salt, lavender, warm bread, all filtering through the earthy petrichor. 

Selde laughed. 

“‘For saints have hands that pilgrims hands do touch, and palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss,’” she quoted, the figs of her cheeks shadowed by her dancing hair. Humidity had lifted the waves of loose auburn hair higher on her shoulders. 

Senet laced his fingers through Selde’s and drew her in front of him. She went up on her tiptoes on instinct. He pressed his free hand to her cheek, her temple, seeking meld points that would allow them to understand one another without words. Her eyes drifted shut, violet shadow and black lashes. His heart in his side and hers in her chest, the pulse of hot blood. So much more intimate than a kiss; she kissed him anyway for the mingling of their breaths and the soft heat of him. Drinking each other in. 

He walked backward, pulling her with him, and lay down on the simple pallet bed, the cream blanket warm beneath them. Selde lay on her back, her legs falling open and blush-pink skirts high near her hips. As Senet eased the meld deeper they each gasped at the sensation of mutuality that it gave them. He lay between her thighs and pressed against her. 

_ Safe, gentle, found, i-am-unafraid-as-are-you, love-ashau, my-friend-my-t’hy’la _ .

Instinct demanded that they become closer, and Selde moved her hands with assurance between them. Pulling or parting clothing, pushing his soft linen trousers down and bringing her skirts up. Senet entered her, gasped deep in his throat. Selde melted around him, and she could only picture the warm, wet earth, open and pliant, the dance of fertility between earth and sunlight and rain. The cradle of her pelvis and rock of her hips, the push of his loins and rhythmic press of his thighs. Senet’s eyes rolled back and shut at the sweetness of it.

And then a deeper sweetness than he had ever known. Rushing along with his pulse. Her rusty moan against his throat, his own voice keening long and low. 

The rain curled down in silver curtains, pounding the earth and cascading off of the sandstone. Cool spray found them, but they did not part. 

Gradual, their breaths calming, Senet withdrew from the meld with delicious slowness.

_ Do-not-go, I-must, I-am-still-here _ . 

Her forehead pressed into his cheek as he took his hand away from her face, the meld points beneath her skin red, veins singing; this reaction was common in Humans unaccustomed to the mind Touch. He nuzzled her, hands tracing over the skin of her shoulders, her naked thighs, where they joined, the folds of her hiked skirt. Her hands searched too, warm over his nude buttocks and the small of his back, caressing the valley of his spine. Mapping each other, found, no longer lost.

***

Air warmed as the storm dwindled, and Selde and Senet rejoined the larger groups at the shrine. They walked close to one another, bodies overlapping at shoulder and hip and wrist. Senet kept pushing his rational thoughts down deep, trying to keep within the moment. So much of his life had been defined by what it  _ should _ or  _ should not _ be; he felt out of practice in living with what  _ was _ . 

Selde, her silence calm and inward, gathered with Vulcan and off-world visitors when the white-haired Keepers called them to meditation. She sat next to her friend on the woven grass mats in front of the T’Gil idol. Lotus position, eyes shut. The Keepers rang ceremonial bells, letting each sharp peal ring to its fullest. Incense curled up against the shrine. One of the younger disciples stood to T’Gil’s left and called in her sweet, clear voice several koans for the pilgrims to meditate upon. An hour later they all rose, centered, at peace. Selde brushed her fingertips along the linen dress and curled her toes in the soft, moccasin-like desert shoes that she had bought for the journey. A compromise, between the shrine’s requirement of throat-to-foot modesty and her dislike of footwear. She felt more grounded with real earth against her feet.

She and Senet descended toward the antigrav path after touring the gardens in companionable silence. She felt open and see-through, like glass; Senet’s meld had been her first, for the link between hands paled in comparison to the Touch on her face. New, unfamiliar, unsettling, even as she sought to understand it.

Some lingering connection must have remained between them, for Senet peered into her eyes and asked if she was well.

“I am?” she said, as if to confirm it with herself. Then firmer, “I am. I am glad we came here together, Senet. It was a gift.”

He hesitated, unable to parse this situation. This had been his first time sharing his body, and he felt open and see-through, like glass. Had he hurt her, was his skin too hot, his bones too heavy? Did he not feel good to her? Her body had been so welcoming, small and warm beneath him.

Selde broke the tension with a gentle smile and sudden embrace, just as she had on the dais at Koon-ut-kali-fee. The scent of lavender in her hair was stronger with the humidity of rain, and Senet buried his face into it. Drew back when he heard a tiny giggle.

April toddled toward them with her fathers flanking her. In her hands she held a basket of woven grasses with v’xin berries piled inside. A small length of pale green linquot cloth hung like a cape from her shoulders and fluttered in the sweet breeze. Every few steps she stopped and ate a berry, her mouth stained with purple juice. The man with the Jamacian accent nodded hello, his eyebrows darting up in recognition. “Hey there, friend Senet. Thank you again. ‘Rilly here got the royal treatment. The Keeper gave us some yellow melon—”

“Krinn melon,” his husband offered.

“That’s it. The yellow kind. Duchess here ate about ten slices, don’t know how she has any more appetite, but here she is.” He picked up their little girl and placed her on his broad shoulders. 

“They gave us cuttings, too,” the other man said, showing Selde a paper envelope rattling with three slender brambles. “V’pret flowers. Do you think we can take them back to Earth?”

“You can,” Selde said. “Just declare them at Spaceport and they will put them through the bio scanners. The v’pret flowers are lovely; they grow on these slender thorned canes and hardly ever need to be watered. Trumpet flowers, pale fuschia. Hummingbirds will love them.”

“It’s a pretty place,” the man said, watching his small family begin to descend the antigrav path. His eyes soft with fondness. “I had no idea Vulcan would be so welcoming.”

“You are always welcome to my home planet. Thank you for sharing this day” Senet said, and the three fell into step with each other, walking west toward the trailing storm. Cool air followed in their wake.


	8. Speak

Monsoon rains swept over the Ga’rret Hills and bent plants in the garden double. The sandstone cliffs above Pret stood obscured by curtains of violent rain, mists and clouds, then fitful sun. The stone seemed breathless, wrung, weeping rain-streak tears. Yet a sweet smell bloomed after each rain, the flowers and trees opening again, creating new bloom or leaf. The rak birds, huddled in sheltering branches, darted through the sky. 

Senet lay in his bed, watching morning storm-light play over the planes and curves of Selde’s face as she slept. Her nose was red with the chill of the underground rooms, not reached by sunlight. She burrowed into the thick covers and soft sheets that he had spread over them, against the cold. A lock of her hair had fallen over her cheek, and he swept this back behind her round ear, tracing his fingertip around the curve of pinna, the swirl of her anthelix. The caress caused her to shudder and draw the sheet up to her temple. Senet withdrew his hand, thinking silent apologies, and eased out of bed. He padded naked across the dim room and drew on a black meditation robe. The smell of cedar clung to his clothes. 

No one else was awake in the house; T’Vell and Tolen yet slept, his hand no doubt on her belly. Her pregnancy would not begin to show for another two months. They had returned from their Seclusion a few weeks prior, her blood already showing traces of vGC hormones to confirm the presence of an embryo. Vulcan estrus began in the male and woke in the female during pon farr; a complication that needed to be addressed in cross-species relationships. Such marriages existed—his cousin-by-marriage-Clan had several such pairings, beginning with Sarek, son of Skon, son of Solkar. They claimed as family Amanda Grayson, Denzel Mbai, James Hristov, and Minako Shoda, Humans all. They were also the source of the first Vulcan-Benona couple, an eyebrow-raising pairing because the Benona were a people of tri-sexuality capable of three-part marriage. Senet considered these marriages to be confirmation that a relationship between he and Selde could work, if he were not already wed.

T’Gris. He had not communicated with her since that terse deferral of their wedding at the beginning of the monsoons. Five weeks of utter silence. When he and Selde returned from the Shrine of T’Gil he had tried once again to contact his spouse, tried to speak to her along their bond, frayed and tenuous as it was. He had received a wordless rebuke, a shove of psychic force. As if he had been slapped, and of course, this is what the rejection metaphorically  _ was. _ In that same rebuke he also understood that T’Gris was not aware of his mind Touch with Selde nor of their sexual union. There was something else in the momentary contact along his bond, the image of a half-familiar Vulcan woman with honey brown hair and deep brown eyes, the sound of copper chimes, gurgle of a seasonal creek. A psychic image of where T’Gris had been in the exact moment he reached for her along their bond. Senet counted himself fortunate that he had been standing alone in the M’Sharis grotto, watching stars reflected in the spring’s shadowed depths.

Now he sat upon the upper balcony with the exterior doors closed, for rain drummed hard on the small deck where he had confronted his parents. His reflection ghosted in the glass, and he sat still, cross-legged, fingers steepled in the m’tol discipline just in front of his solar plexus. 

He sank into meditation breath by breath, trying to ignore the ache in his scars that the rains sometimes brought. Most unfortunate was the one at the base of his sternum, for focus on this place was vital to the m’tol mantras. All two hundred and four of them. It could not be helped; perhaps his meditation could lessen the low, constant pain. 

He would contact T’Gris soon.

  
  


***

  
  


“You know the consequences of this, Senet,” T’Vell said, her arms folded across her flat belly. The rains had stopped for the day, and the air ached with chill. They were dressed in slender soft suits, jackets open partially to counteract cold. She sighed. “It is your right to leave the marriage, and I shall support you. There will be social and monetary damage, but these will fade with time. In honesty, I believe your union with T’Gris was an ill match; there seems to be no union at all, in spite of your perennial efforts to create a social bond with her.”

Senet helped T’Vell down a stone outcrop, for she was pale and ill with “morning sickness” that liked to strike in mid-afternoon. The fresh air helped. She allowed a tiny smile at her brother as she grasped his hands. There was joy singing in the telepathic Touch along their fingertips. He had always seemed determined and quietly resigned about his marriage; he had friends enough among his Masu Tan’tor Guild and T’Vell’s own circle of friends and colleagues expanded when he joined her and Tolen in Pret. Senet’s talent for listening to people made up for his shy and taciturn nature; people who conversed with him felt deeply understood by the end of their acquaintance.

“I have sent a missive to T’Gris, asking for a meeting. She has not responded, but I shall press if she does not answer within twenty-six hours.”

“You are getting assertive in your ‘old age.’” T’Vell said, deadpan but with the honey-warmth in her eyes. Thirty-four for a Vulcan man was young, barely more than a child. She, at thirty, would have been considered a teenage bride if adjusted for Human marriage customs, a thought that amused her deeply behind her Vulcan calm. 

She walked along behind Senet, who scouted ahead on the desert trail to see the condition of the wash that they might cross; monsoons brought with them flash floods, brutal, deadly, and short-lived. He beckoned to her from the wash’s high bank. Safe. She peered down before she descended and noticed tumbled evergreen stumps, sand sprawled in the lee of sandstone boulders, trace fossils of burrowing worms from ages past. Mut-ek’puyik grass, devoid of grain, looped around bark-stripped branches and caught against jutting dune-cedar roots. She picked her way down and hopped across a settled puddle of water and silt the color of creamy coffee. The thought made her nausea roil, and she breathed deep to quell it. Senet waited until she passed to the opposite bank and stood behind her with a solicitous hand at her hip. She climbed the rest of the way.

“Ten months of this, Mother said. Her sickness did not pass for either of us, but she said T’Kess gave her no trouble. With our youngest sister it was headaches and swollen feet.” T’Vell sighed heavily as they traversed beneath llal’en trees with their fragrant bark and evergreen fronds open to the moist air. She should cut some and make incense, once her stomach settled. For the birth ceremonies. If her child was a girl she would be named Mir, if he was a boy he would be named Shafor. She kept these names in her mouth as she walked. 

“Have you told Mother and Father of the child?” Senet asked behind her. 

“Not yet. I wanted to keep it to ourselves for a while. Have you told them of your decision to dissolve the marriage with T’Gris?”

“No.” A subterranean tremor in his voice, a suppressed fear. 

T’Vell breathed deep again, trying to master the emotions that Senet’s voice called forth. Their parents had always been stern with him; a coldness was present in their treatment that she and their sister T’Kess had never experienced. Firstborn sons and daughters often bore the brunt of family alliance and tradition; she wondered what would have become of Senet had he not been born a water-giver or fallen easily into their father-Clan trade of actuarial science. She had been free to pursue studies in botany; T’Kess was off-world, two years deep in Starfleet Academy. 

The dissolution of Senet’s Bond with T’Gris would earn him damages; he would owe recompense in the form of money or property. His own Clans could scorn him, declare him vrekasht. Divorce  _ after _ the first Seclusion was common, once Clan alliances had been reaffirmed, but this divorce would occur before. Uncommon. Uncertain. Bold. She admired her brother for his bravery.

Selde would be a good match for Senet. T’Vell had seen how at ease her brother had been from the beginning, his admiration of the citrine stones so freely given. The golden hue of the gems had been a happy coincidence; yellow was their mother-Clan’s heraldry color. He had set the stones in his formal meditation robe, made of heavy black material that would keep him warm in the Pilgrimage Monasteries that Vulcan men visited at seven phases within their lifetimes. 

Her sister-by-marriage had been a friend since T’Vell was small, still an unwed girl without the honorific T’ in front of her birth name. Selde had been a few years younger, a child with soft green eyes and a plush toy moose clutched beneath her arm. They had played together in the hybrid garden outside of T’Laet and Vanet’s home while Tolen charged about, trying to impress by hopping from boulder to boulder without falling. Both girls had a love for lavender flowers, collecting silicate stones, walking in rivers with bare feet. Both knew the value of silence.

The evergreen forest now opened to a desert vista at the edge of a small stone cliff, and T’Vell watched monsoon storms piling against the Llangon Mountains. Tomorrow would be hot, with another volley of storms over the following five days. Coming to the end of the monsoons. Drought would follow.

“Tolen and Selde said they would return from the labs after supper. When we return I will make you barkaya marak.” Senet drew beside her and stood with his hands behind his back, meditating upon the deepening shadows. He noticed T’Vell’s wince. “Or not. Herb broth again?”

“Please.” 

They stood in silence for a long while, listening to lara and rak birds singing twilight songs. T’Kuht, waxing again, cast a flame-yellow glow over the planet. Sighing toward the dark.

  
  


***

  
  


“He is a fool.”

“Senet?”

“Yes. He is both a fool and a brave man.” Tolen withdrew a tray of grain seeds from the stasis chambers and laid them on the central table. A crease of preoccupation deepened between his upswept eyebrows. “Not to say that I feel his actions are foolish, only that his Clan is a heavily traditional one, and this challenge to tradition will not go unanswered.”

Selde swallowed against a dry mouth and passed a scanner over the wakening grains. Germination already stirring on a molecular level. The scanner chirped affirmation. 

“Have heart,” Tolen said, noticing. His expression smoothed as he took the final tray from the chamber. “T’Vell and I both support you. Senet will pay double the bride price; this much is certain. But forfeiting land and water shares may be negotiable. This will be a blow to his holdings but not an unmanageable one.”

“That is only the material cost,” Selde said, taking refuge in the scanner. Purpose, cool, rational, unwavering. 

“Yes.”

Tolen glanced at his sister, her face grim in spite of the mindfulness she was reaching for. He allowed himself to acknowledge his empathy and then set to work with the grain. 

The social cost of this dissolved Bond would be great. Senet would forfeit the reaffirmed alliance between the Lance and Masu-nihk Clans. He would be seen as a liability, a rebel, his desire to wed another a rejection of tradition. Tolen wondered at the careless Bonding that Senet’s parents had arranged. His brother-by-marriage and wife seemed to have no compatibility in the few times that he had seen them together. T’Gris actively avoided Senet at High Tradition gatherings, turning her back when he stood at her side, her short black hair seeming to cut the air between them like an obsidian knife. If Tolen were Human he would call the situation “heartbreaking.” As a Vulcan, he called it unfortunate in the extreme.

T’Gris was more interested in her friend T’Laya, a woman with honey-brown hair and startling brown eyes so deep they bordered on black. There had been whispers that she was a ko-ku’ashausu, a woman who loved other women. Indeed, her solicitousness toward T’Gris had been sufficient enough that Tolen himself suspected. The hard planes of T’Gris’s face had softened only when she and T’Laya conversed. The other woman was of the Fli’plai Guild, a traditional arts group that made scrolls and bound books. A good match, for a transcription artist.

Senet and T’Gris’s marriage smacked of a transaction, rather than a union. 

Selde turned one of the trays and placed it under a GroLight module. The grains fell into soil pods. Total germination would be reached in ten days, then they would see if this crop was viable. "Did you tell Mom and Dad about the baby yet?"  


“No.” Tolen’s mouth curved in a mischievous smile. “In a few weeks. We had to tell you and Senet because of the amount of time T’Vell spends feeling ill. I will purchase some of the v’let herb packets at the markets before we return home. They seem to be the only thing her digestion handles. Her doctor says it may or may not pass. She is ‘taking it one day at a time,’ as your Human idiom says.”

“Probably the best way to take anything,” Selde said. “Thank you for the metaphor.”

Tolen snorted, his version of a laugh that he used in the labs when other Vulcans may be present. There was cultural diplomacy in these small acts of emotionalism. They made for better friendships and bonds with species like Humans, Rigelians, and so many others who did not adhere to the logic and traditions of the Vulcan people. They were also a sort of psychic “release valve” for Tolen himself; in many Vulcans the dedication to logic turned toward suppression, rather than mastery. Suppression was unhealthy, a mirror of logic, a chimera of Cthia. Mastery, including small emotional concession, was grace. 

Later, walking in the milky light from T’Kuht, he reached out to Selde beside him and walked with an arm about her shoulders. She leaned into him, all muscle and knot with tension beneath his hand. 

Privately, he shared this tension. To break with tradition on Vulcan was not an easy path, but it was a necessary one, he felt. He and T’Vell had decided not to betrothe their children from a young age but help them find and nurture relationships with partners as they grew. His parents had done as much when he and Vell were small children, and he vaguely remembered a dozen other girls introduced as playmates before a final agreement was reached. Some of them had shunned Selde, so he walked off with her to the spring in rejection of this bigotry. Some had been disinterested, some dismissive. Vell, when they did meet, did not stand in awe of his leaping from stone to stone or lecture him on safety. Instead, she had joined him after deeming the activity interesting and pulled Selde up with her. They had spent that first afternoon playing with aimless, childhood joy in the gardens. Weaving circlets of lavender, mining for stones in a dry creek bed, wetting their feet in sandy puddles and gathering evergreen berry “rations” for survival on a remote planet in their minds. Vell was a companion, a friend from the beginning. 

Now he and Selde drew close to the lights of home, a few brave vritt’al moths searching for nectar near their feet. He could see T’Vell and Senet in silhouette on the upper balcony, light from Vulcan’s sister planet catching in his wife’s long dark hair, loose and free upon the night wind. 


	9. Indemnity

Tulek tu, vokau.

Tulek tu, vokau.

Tulek tu, vokau.

Senet breathed and kept to his meditation on the tram ride to the city of Kora, where T’Gris lived with her family. Set on the shores of the Voroth Sea in the province of Raal, the village was home to ancient book and language arts, hence T’Gris’s ink-stained hands and hills rich with libraries and bookstores. Paper had evolved from this province, due to the wetlands and extensive drainage basin that allowed for the formation of papyrus-like papers. The v’dess plant also favored these shores, its fibers excellent for a linen pulp that made archival paper unrivaled for several star systems. Senet had always found excuses to linger in the museums and shops during his sporadic journeys to Raal. These hours were always more pleasant than the time he had spent with T’Gris and her people. 

His heart pounded in his side with enough force that he thought his ribs might break. Again, he forced his attention back to the mantra and his breath. His scars ached with the change in altitude; Pret was semi-mountainous, at an elevation of 1,773 meters above sea level. Kora lay low, at three.

The tram sighed to a stop near the city square, and he stepped out into an afternoon scented with salt air, baking bread, and the slightly unpleasant odor of mudflats at low tide. He coughed at the unaccustomed humidity and walked to a café for an order of sparkling water flavored with kelik milk and lime. 

A headache joined the pounding of his heart. Just behind his eyes. Lovely.

The walk to T’Gris’s family compound was pleasant, with the narrow streets shaded by stone buildings that seemed to lean into one another toward the rooflines. Shutters painted green, blue, violet, and black pulled shut against zenith sunlight. Baskets of cascading succulents hung from porches and stairwells, and a pair of cats from Earth lounged on someone’s street-level patio. Twin animals, both black. One opened her cunning yellow eyes at him, the pupils sharp slits.

He stopped at a high brick wall, topped by v’minnet vines and centered around a door painted bright blue. He hesitated only a moment before pressing his hand to the scanner; what is, is, and what would be, would be.

“T'nar pahk sarat y'rani,” T’Gris said in her flint-sharp voice as she answered the door.

“T'nar jaral.” Senet dropped the Standard that he had grown accustomed to and greeted T’Gris in her own Vulcan dialect. He had only half mastered the tongue of the Voroth Sea, and his pronunciation marked him as one from the far north. 

They crossed an octagonal central courtyard and entered a building with its door to true east. An elderly sehlat lay stretched by a neighboring door, and it thumped its stump of a tail on the cool flagstones. Senet wished he could remain outdoors, under the sheltering branches of succulent trees, but he followed T’Gris and her straight spine into the dim rooms of her house. 

Shadow and cedar incense swallowed them whole, and there was a vague sense of hallways and chambers lying closed on either side as they passed through the house. Dead silent. A firejewel shrine flickered in the dark. A small child protested against a nap from behind a shared wall, but otherwise all remained still. The midday siesta was at hand, an escape from Vulcan’s high summer heat. Finally, T’Gris pressed into a sunlit studio, UV tint heavy in the windows and golden light hitting the floor in thick squares. White walls. Terra cotta tile floor. An imported ocotillo plant flowering in one corner. Two desks sat in the center of the austere room, layers of paper covering one, a half-finished scroll and two ink pots on the other. Lids screwed tight. 

To his surprise the woman from his telepathic link to T’Gris stood from where she had been sitting on a low divan. Rose-pink gown from throat to foot, her honey-brown hair coiled atop her head. She was the perfect antithesis to his wife, who stood small and dressed in severe gray robes, a thick sash of navy blue tight about her waist. T’Gris now turned to him, her expression cold, black bob curled around her perfect ears, the slight scar puckering her lower lip the only flaw. He did not know how she received it; the scar had appeared some time after her twelfth year, but she had never mentioned its reason.

“T’Laya,” she said, indicating the woman behind her with a graceful wave of one ink-stained hand before sitting on a hard bench below one window. “An artist from the Fli’plai Guild and my friend. You may speak of our Bonding in her presence, my husband.”

Sulfur in her voice. This was not only indifference, but loathing.

Senet nodded in greeting to T’Laya, who bowed her head in graceful acknowledgement. Strangely, there was a ghost of sorrow about her eyes. None of T’Gris’s coldness reflected there.

“It is indeed our Bonding that I must speak of,” Senet said. Here the truth was at hand. He breathed deep, past his aches, past his trepidation. Found center, pressed forward. “I wish to dissolve our Bond, T’Gris. I feel that we are ill-suited for one another, and I wish to prevent the continuation of a marriage that neither of us seems to desire.”

T’Gris sat still, her hands yet folded. T’Laya, by the second window, did not move but her face seemed to dawn triumphant nonetheless. 

A small, sardonic part of him quipped that at least someone in the room was happy.

“Our marriage is dissolved. I release you.” T’Gris stood and began to walk from the room. Under her breath but purposely loud enough for him to hear, she whispered “Kre’nath.”

Bastard. He supposed he was. Senet remained still, waiting for raised voices of parents, siblings, the household sehlat. None came. The woman by the window walked to him. Willowy and serene. The happiness high in her eyes was real. This was a surprise; he had expected defensiveness, the sarcastic double-speak that Vulcans used to condemn each other without seeming emotional. T’Laya stepped close, sunlight soft in the heavy coils of her hair. 

“I thank you, Senet,” she murmured. A voice deep and sweet, like the night.

He blinked and cast an uncertain glance over his shoulder at the empty doorway. How had Selde put it? Waiting for the other shoe to drop. 

“My thanks is meant truthfully,” T’Laya said, and here her voice quavered, as if suppressing a laugh. “I mean you no harm, my friend. I am sincere. I have tried to convince T’Gris to dissolve your marriage for some time, not out of malice but because she is so unsatisfied within it. Though Clan alliances are needed, I believe our people have become… trammeled?... by tradition. Alliance can be shown in other ways than marriage, can they not?”

Senet’s eyes flicked to the two work tables in the center of the studio, one of ink and pen, the other of paper. Evidently the alliance between T’Gris and T’Laya had been forming for quite some time. Years. When had he first seen her? The year he brought his wife the samples of ink from twelve different planets as a gift. The Karil gathering in midwinter. He had been twenty-five. 

He felt as though he had been knocked slightly off-center from his body. Confusion, anger, frustration, despair. He breathed deep, again, and found his center. Looked to T’Laya, who had been speaking as he stared at the layers of paper.

“...to ask your forgiveness is beyond bold of me. However, I know that the union has been an unsatisfactory one. I have seen you trying to be a good spouse and I have seen her reject you. Your patience and compassion have been endless, Senet. I can only hope you accept my apology.”

He stared at her, anger filtering through his composed expression like shadows on flowing water. “You are lovers in an ukhru-vishan?”

“Yes.” T’Laya bowed her head. “My husband Kenon has his own. A man named Sev. We find that this arrangement works the best for both of us.”

Senet nodded, pieces of information and half-formed thoughts falling into place. T’Laya’s presence at holidays. The family’s dismissiveness when he visited, his wife’s coldness.

“If she was unsatisfied with our union she could have  _ asked _ me to dissolve it long ago,” Senet said, his voice as cold as winter. “I am brought close to my Time, and if I did not have my own motivation to divorce T’Gris my life would have been in danger.”

T’Laya blinked hard at this breach of taboo, his oblique reference to pon farr and fatality from an unanswered plak tow. Again, she bowed her head in an attitude of submission while Senet allowed himself to acknowledge his fury. Bit by bit, he brought himself back down to the center of mastery. Hurt and rejection remained suppressed, secretive. The headache thumped hard behind his eyes and his scars ached with each pulse. He wanted to go home.

A long silence hung in the room, pendulums of thought swinging between T’Laya and himself. There was still the matter of divorce and payment for the failure of his marriage.

“I am sorry, Senet. Tradition is strong within T’Gris’s family, and she has lacked bravery to come forward. So too was she limited by tradition, unable to initiate divorce and only demand the Kali-fee. Here we all must break with tradition if we are going to bring your marriage to a close. Please let me be your advocate,” T’Laya murmured. Her lashes thick and obscuring her eyes, her cheeks flushed delicate green. 

“Advocate?”

“For the bride price, the price of your land and water, your property and your promise. I know I can convince T’Gris to let your shares of property go, but I cannot convince her family to disregard the rest. I may be able to argue them down to a single payment, rather than double, if I present my husband’s lover as an alternative spouse for T’Gris. It will give the appearance of a marriage without the function of one. Her family may very well spare you.” T’Laya looked up with her remarkable eyes once more. They were soft with compassion. “Please, Senet. Let me help.”

***

  
  


Stars wheeled slowly overhead as the tram sped back toward ShiKhar. Senet looked out of the dark berth windows as he traveled west, his headache still strong. He felt as if he had been wrung. Shortly after T’Laya had made her remarkable proposal to him T’Gris and her father entered the studio, the older man looking ready to come at Senet with a lirpa. 

Six hours later they arrived at a compromise. T’Gris would marry—symbolically, as she, T’Laya, and Senet knew—Sev, who had already “sent” a proposal through the Fli’plai Guild. Senet would pay one and a half times the usual bride price toward the new household, and the Lance Clan would forfeit the rights to Senet’s portion of the Masu-nikh Clan holdings. An officiant was summoned, an elderly Healer who growled his way through the divorce ceremony, held in the courtyard with the sleeping sehlat. The breaking of the Bond was brief. The Healer laid a hand on T’Gris’s face, then Senet’s, and a severing sensation snapped down all of his telepathic synapses. Disorienting, but not painful. A gap within his thoughts remained but closed fast, like a small child losing a milk tooth and briefly fascinated by the vacancy. 

Sev was contacted and asked to come to the Lance Clan house the next morning. Senet silently wished him luck. 

Now, with one triumphant couple at his back and another somewhere in the darkness ahead, he felt relieved of a heavy burden. He did not look forward to revealing his divorce to his parents—there was another battle to be fought—but there was also Selde, no doubt asleep in his bed with the sheets warm around her. Skin bare to his touch. 

The house lay quiet when he arrived, but someone had left a lamp burning in the central hall for him.

Selde woke briefly when he slipped into bed, her arm coming up over his chest as she cuddled into his side. She smelled of sweat, bread, flowers. Her hair silky against his bare arms. “Sleep,” he whispered, “all is well.”

Noon had passed by the time he woke, headache gone and scars only twinging with ache. A better start. Selde had left two buttered croissants in a plate by his bed, along with a glass of orange juice. 

She entered his room while he ate with the covers puddled around him. 

“How did you sleep?” She slid beneath the blankets, her lavender skirts bunching against her legs. 

“Well, for what it was worth. I am not entirely recovered. I brought you a journal from one of the bound book shops.” 

Selde smiled, but it did not quite reach her eyes.

“What is wrong, Juniper?” Senet tried for levity by using her middle name, but Selde’s expression did not brighten.

“Your parents. They were quite incensed when they called on the comm. T’Vell handled it for the moment, but. Well. Words were said.”

“What words?”

“Nothing that cannot be unsaid, but I am sorry that you have to endure what you’re having to endure. No offense meant, Senet, but I do not think I will like my in-laws very much.”

The silence lay easy between them in spite of the looming sense of strife. Senet glanced at Selde, who was staring into the shadowed corners of his rooms with her arms about her knees and her hair loose. Smelling of soap, of water, of the olive oil she must have used to make lunch. He heard the unspoken message in her words; though neither of them had proposed to one another she already thought of his parents as future family. Such as they were. 

“So,” she spoke with a thread of amusement through her grief. “What happened when you told T’Gris? Did she deck you?”

“Only figuratively.”

“Spill, Gamepiece. All the gossip.”

He told her as many details as he could remember: the Earth cats, the succulents and shutters, the sehlat and sunlight falling on the floor. T’Laya, T’Gris, the names of husbands that he could barely remember, the father, the divorce agreement and the Healer, bitter at being dragged out into the heat to deal with a foolish whelp and a petulant girl. “His actual words, though his mood lightened when T’Gris offered him a glass of wine. I suppose being well over two hundred years old will diminish one’s need for social graces.”

“Any lingering effects?” Selde reached up and touched his forehead in the place that she had once called his “third eye.” There was a meld point here, and a nascent telepathic connection flickered along her unschooled Touch. 

“No.” Senet took her hand and held it to his side, where his heart beat in contentment.

“Good.” She leaned forward and kissed his sharp cheekbone. “I feel sorrow for T’Gris. All her life and she was set to condemn herself—and you—to a marriage that neither wanted, only to please her family and her Clan. It may have been a logical arrangement, but Vulcan society can be so damned harsh. Two lives made miserable because one Clan wanted another’s genetic link and water rights.”

“Three lives,” Senet said. “I count T’Laya; she has great love for T’Gris. My wife—ex-wife—is not the thorny person whom I have known since I was a child. They love each other. It is obvious for those who choose to see.”

“Her parents do not see then?”

“No. They cherish illusion. Or more accurately, they cherish what should be, rather than what is. T’Gris’s marriage to Sev will please them enough. I relieve my shoulders of this burden.”

Senet left his other burden unvoiced, one that occurred to him only after the Healer had interviewed him briefly, and alone, before the divorce meld: Were there any children between them? Had the marriage with T’Gris ever been consummated? Had Senet ever had sexual intercourse? Was it in the depths of plak tow? Had he ever endured pon farr? No? At your age? See a Healer soon, child, you should have reached this milestone by now. Have you a mate whom you shall wed? How soon? See your doctor, you foolish whelp. I believe something is wrong.


	10. Consequence

Healer Sidon, disciple of the Kolinahr, ran the med-scanner twice over Senet’s body. Impassive face, deep bronze skin, his textured hair tight against his head. Graceful hands. He had been Senet’s doctor since his return to Vulcan.

Senet folded his hands on his belly as he lay on the exam table, a white robe covering him from throat to ankle. He had expected this; the radiation burns from Keristar had largely healed but required monitoring.

The doctor ran the med-scanner over him a third time, a fourth. Senet frowned against the fear that crept up his spine. He suppressed it, hard. Calculated the volume at winter and summer levels for the new Pret cisterns. Possible intake, output, export, surplus.  Sidon lay the scanner aside and palpated at Senet’s belly, the joints high at the top of his inner thighs. Pressure points. Finally, the doctor took a hypospray and made a withdrawal of tissue from under the white robe. 

Senet flinched, not expecting the press of a hypo in such an intimate place. Tilted his head to watch the doctor scan the tissue sample at the medi-bay lab. 

Doctor Sidon straightened and approached the biobed. Stared at Senet for a moment and folded his hands behind his back.

“The radiation burns from Keristar affected dermal and subdermal tissues over the middle third of your body. Though we can quell radiation poisoning and heal tissues, there are some functions that cannot be entirely repaired. You suffered such burns from your sternum to mid-thigh, most notably deep tissue damage. Your hands have healed quite well, as has your gut biome. Though the seminal vesicles are healed with no permanent damage, the damage to the systems of sperm cell production and vasa deferentia were grievous; they inflamed to the point of creating permanent, adverse effects. While you are capable of reproductive acts, your body is incapable of total repair. The result is that you are sterile.”

Senet lay still. Breathing. Barely. 

He was aware of each individual second that passed. They felt like years.

“Senet?”

He nodded, not trusting his tongue. Listened to his heartbeat. Struggled for logic. For acceptance. Wanted to howl.

Instead, he met the doctor’s impassive gaze.

“There is no recourse?” He hated that his voice rasped, on the edge of breaking. 

Here the doctor’s impassivity faltered, slight enough that one unaccustomed to Vulcans might not have noticed. Coming from a disciple of the Kolinhar, this microexpression was the human equivalent of deep sorrow. He straightened and addressed the opposite wall. “There is no recourse. Your hormonal levels were initially affected but have reached an equilibrium; save for the lingering scar tissue you are healthy. I trust you have a mate with whom you will bond.”

“Yes.” Senet’s voice felt as if it were a stone dropped down a deep well, too deep to hear the answering splash of water. 

“May I inquire their name?”

“Selde Bride, daughter of Heather, daughter of Fiona. She is Human.”

Sidon raised an eyebrow and went to the data banks. Pressed a few keys and prepared a padd with several files. “You may dress. Leave the robe on the biobed. Has your wife lived on Vulcan long?”

“Most of her life.” Senet watched his limbs move and his hands draw his clothes back on. As if they belonged to someone else, as if he were moving in a dream. “I have known her for a year and five point six months.”

“A well-founded courtship. I am preparing files for her education in preparation of marrying a Vulcan male. This is information that other Human females have found useful. The privacy code is available through my office. Please have her contact the automated data link through a household comm—preferably a private one.” Sidon brought the medical padd to Senet and lay it on the biobed, which chirped in communication with the smaller computer. “Please have T’Selde direct any questions toward me. There are other options for conception of children, but she will require hormonal treatments and gestational therapy.”

Senet fastened his tunic. Numb. Damaged. His divorce from T’Gris suddenly seemed nothing in comparison to this. “Has a situation similar to mine occurred before?” 

“Yes.” Sidon said. Hesitated. “However, a donation of a genetic sample from a Vulcan is unlikely; our people trace family lineages with a precision not found in many of the other Federation cultures. As you know, outright adoption is rare on our planet, while fostering is common.” 

“Thank you, Healer.” Senet took the padd from the biobed and began to leave. Stopped with his back turned as Sidon spoke again.

“A Human who marries a Vulcan should be schooled in the discipline of the mind Touch. I have assisted several Humans in these disciplines, should T’Selde choose to pursue them. I am available to help her.”

“I shall inform her.” Senet walked out of the examination room as if somnambulant. 

Clinic, hallways, courtyard, tramway. All passed before him like half-recognized memory. He clutched the padd as if it were a lifeline, the only thing real in a world that felt like a bad hallucination.

Senet fought nausea as the ground tram swayed, curved about corners, dipped into tunnels. A monsoon raged within him, though he appeared placid to others. In control. Travellers, commuters, the path before them sure. A Vulcan woman shifted the linen-wrapped bundle in her arms and dropped the front of her brown dress to reveal a copper-skinned breast. She pressed the bundle to it and a tiny hand groped for her collarbone. A baby, drinking its milk. Senet bit his tongue hard and looked away. Metallic blood welled in his mouth. He chopped his hand in front of the chassis sensor, requesting that the tram stop. 

Walking out in the wind and heat took away some of his grief. He followed the road under full-bore sunlight, his inner eyelids flicking closed every time the wind blew too hard. The northern hemisphere had entered its windy season, haboob dust storms swallowing cities.

His thoughts turned in circles. What worth was a man who could not give his spouse children? Marriage was not only an insurance against death by biochemical immolation; children created a sense of community between families and made war abhorrent. Children were vital to the Cthia philosophy.

Senet did not fear that Selde would leave; she withstood the anger of his parents alongside him, going with him to their house in D’sal. His parents sent them away with the instruction that they were not to come to any family gatherings through the close of the year. This was likely a rebuke rather than a lasting punishment. When word of this spread throughout the Clans he was surprised to receive several communications from cousins, inviting him and Selde to various gatherings through spring. A defiance of his parents’ actions. Encouraging. 

He arrived home to find Selde sitting in meditation in her rooms. Emerald green robe tented over her shoulders, whispering under her breath the mantra “Tulek tu, vokau.” The words translated to “You are the vessel, remember,” a phrase spoken to infants at birth, those close to the end of their lives, and during the transfer of a katra. A koan of circularity: birth, death, renewal. Another pang in his side as he watched his fiancée, her palms pressed together in front of her chin. She meditated according to traditions from her own planet, sometimes using a string of carnelian mala beads. Breath and mantra, the sacred number 108.

He sat opposite, mirroring her posture. Steepled his fingers in front of his navel. Reached inward for calm, even as his scars twinged with ache. A mocking pain. Breath by breath he sank into an inner world and chased center, Cthia, a release and an acceptance. Struggled. Twitched with grief. Surfaced. Night had fallen and Selde was sitting on her wool rug with her back against the wall. Medical padd in her lap. Reading. How she had opened the password-protected files he did not know, but he had his suspicions; she had let slip once that some of her companions during her runaway year were of the “unsavory” type. Which he took to mean “criminals,” likely capable of hacking a Vulcan database.

“Doctor Sidon sent that for you,” Senet said, rising to join her. Her rooms were spare, a direct contrast with the soft colors and layers of clothing that she preferred to wear. A round mirror with a gold rim, a folding wooden screen of polished dune-cedar. A bed, a bureau. Save for the light green rug and a hanging lamp made of amber glass, there was no color. “He also has offered to help you with the mind Touch.”

Selde’s head rested on his shoulder as she continued to read: balancing Vulcan/Human nutrition requirements, the taboo subject of sex, the hybridization of children. Senet glanced down at his hands at this one. The scars had lost their slick green appearance and now seemed sunk into his flesh. Slightly lighter in color as if he had been stitched shut with threads of his own skin. 

“What else did Sidon say?”

Senet swallowed, his throat clicking dry. She heard and turned to him, her green eyes preternaturally sharp in the dim light.

“I am healthy,” he said, quelling her fear before it could surface. Indeed, Selde relaxed a little. Her hand cool on his forearm, thumb tracing his scars in an unconscious soothing motion.

Words were insufficient. He turned to face her, holding his hand up toward her temple in silent question. She smiled and closed her eyes. 

His fingers caressed her face at five different meld points, two high on her forehead, the others light on her cheekbone and thumb resting just beneath the tear duct of her left eye. There were other Touches, for Bonding, communication, grief. The Touch that woke the pon farr drive in a mate. Most of these were instinctual for a Vulcan, though refining telepathic bonds required practice. And caution. He would recommend Selde go see his Healer for the marriage Bond; the result of a bad meld was grievous psychic injury.

_ My mind to your mind, my thoughts to your thoughts. _

_ Those words are so much more beautiful in your dialect, Mav-dohn.  _ A trickle of amusement like warm water in his mind as Selde laughed within.

_ Hush.  _ Love and grief in his inner voice.

_ Together. Let me show you. _

_ Space surrounds him. Dark, cold womb, stars shining like the birth-sweat in a laboring mother’s hair. His hands are clumsy in the spacetight gloves, but he improves with practice. Freefall disorientation dissipates if he keeps his eyes fixed on the asteroid and his task. Pipes form freely under his hands. Dexterous. How can people live in so fragile and beautiful a bubble, like atmosphere? Sarok. Love-grief-friend-loss. Brotherly love as they speak of an anticipated visit to the sea. His voice far away through the comm even though they work side by side. Instinct flashes: pay attention. He turns with dread toward a grav-unit augering into place nearby. A scent of danger, even though there is no air. It is the smell of adrenaline, of electricity, synapse, blood. _

_ Blood. Pain. Sear. Tear. Flesh. Rend. Blood and blood and blood, frothing green from Sarok’s mouth and nose, the eyes upturned, already rupturing. Senet screams in his own helmet, voice raw. Shredding. O Oekon, the pain. Burn. Burn. Burn. _

_ His screams echo when someone takes his helmet off. He does not recognize the sound as his own voice. He is lost in the blood and burning.  _

_ His spine arches. Jaw snaps. Someone screaming for a hypo, goddamnit-where-is-the-fucking-DOCTOR? Someone young and not quite knowing what she is doing. He hears her panic and compassion. They are alone with Sarok’s corpse.  _

_ Time. Dreams. Loss.  _

_ No center. _

_ A doctor, eyes behind a force field. They hold up his shredded glove as an illustration of what he endured. Burns and blisters, the break of his skin, the discharge of blood-tinged serum trickling down his side. He shivers. Tries to look down at the welts covering his body. A nurse pulls his head back down on the pillow. His tears pool in his ears. The anesthetics they give him prevent a healing coma. They mean well but do not know how to treat his species. He clenches his jaw, trying to explain through his teeth. They give him the goddamn hypospray.  _

_ On Vulcan. Healer Sidon. Mind Touch, his eyes close as he is allowed to heal at last.  _

_ Walking for the first time since the colony’s destruction. As though he has never walked before. Bent, trembling. Water. Water. He cannot get enough.  _

_ Scans. Scars fade. Little by little. He attends Sarok’s memorial service, his friend’s body having been destroyed back on what remained of Keristar. Bore the brunt of the radiation. Sarok’s widow, his baby daughter. Senet. Sa-kai. He thought of you as one. _

_ Loss-hush-glances. It was him. He was the one who lived. T’Vell comes to him, the ends of her hair like needles on his cheek as she draws him in for an embrace. He cannot give her the traditional Touch of hands as a greeting; his are swathed in bandages. A pretense; live with her for propriety’s sake. He knows it is because of his fragility. Tolen, a man of endless patience, who drives him to and from the hospital for weeks, months. Speaks in spare phrases. A classic Vulcan feint. His sister is returning home. Senet does not wish to see anyone new. He will welcome her anyway. _

_ Selde, unknown and uncertain, his first Human who was not screaming for a hypo while he writhes on the deck with his skin already blistering and decon beams sweeping the glass-shard-smoke-hellish room. No. Come back from this. Keristar is long over, Sarok long dead. There is no more pain. _

_ There is ruin.  _

_ Blood-break. Lineage falters. Death. His ruined body, his damaged self. _

_ Sterile. Scars. There will be no children.  _

_ Yes, there will be, Senet. _

_ I cannot give you children.  _

_ Not biologically, no. _

_ You do not grieve? _

_ No.  _ _ I grieve  _ with _ thee. I sorrow. I do not grieve for myself nor for us. There will be children. We will just have to get creative. _

_ How? Vulcan-lineage-Clan-House-intricate and imprisoned by tradition, trammeled by taboo— _

_ Is that all you think there is? Sorrow-joy-empathy-fond-frustration. Vulcans can be singularly uncreative. Amusement mixes with sorrow like blood-in-water.  _

_ Her red blood, as exotic to him as fire-garnets. He wants to drink the water with her blood in it. _

_ That is creative, Senet. Maybe poetry is your gift.  _

_ I am sorry. _

_ Do not be. There will be children. Our children. You are not alone. _

_ I am not alone.  _

_ I am here. _

When he took his hand away from Selde’s face his fingertips were wet with her tears.


	11. Vo'ektau

Morning frost covered the high desert, the higher elevations of the mountains above Pret shrouded in low clouds and mist. Snow traced down but evaporated once it touched the desert floor. The pines wore thin shawls of white. Senet and Selde, well bundled in woolen layers, lay in the dry belly of a wide, sandy wash and looked up at the indistinct clouds that promised more precipitation, perhaps a fitful rain. Somewhere in the hills above water extractors whirred to life, drawing moisture from the air to fill gravity cisterns disguised as sandstone outcrops in the northern canyon. Senet calculated the volume that three days of low-pressure weather might provide. Smiled and kissed his bride’s fingertips in satisfaction that the water reserves of Pret would be met long before spring. A good year. 

“That one looks like a bunny rabbit.”

He looked at Selde sideways, deigning not to answer. 

She flashed him a cheeky grin, all wink and eye tooth. Snow clouds always hung in an undefined mist with no edges; the dreary cloud was patently a stratus nebulosus rather than the fluffy, shape-shifting stratocumulus cumulogenitus. 

“That one looks like nimbostratus,” Senet said. Linked his fingers in hers and lay their paired hands on the cool sand. Pillowed his head on his arm and crossed his ankles. 

Their Bonding ceremony two days before had been sweet and brief, held in the small koon-ut-kali-fee arena of Pret, rather than the larger, more prestigious one in the mountains above ShiKhar. V’pret vines, canes gone bright orange and winter dormant, cascaded over the semi-circular row of columns. Their families pressed close around the central fire ring, firejewels glowing and refracting, sandalwood incense lingering in the misty air. Since Senet’s parents still did not speak to him they were not in attendance. Defying the Clan, T’Vera, her husband Xer, T’Minnet, Sedon, and their toddler son attended. Gifted with subtle joy the hothouse lavender flowers that Selde had woven into her hair, the sandalwood imported from earth. Tolen, T’Vell, T’Laet, and Vanet stood with Selde; it was not appropriate for Sesa to be in attendance at a wedding, but she had sent a welcoming gift of a moonstone necklace, which Selde had worn about her neck.

Healer Sidon had been the officiant, guiding the new couple because he was a friend and because Selde was Human; a telepathic marriage Bond between a Vulcan and Human was a tenuous thing in the beginning. He had spanned his hand over one side of Selde’s face while Senet placed his fingers on the other in the correct position for this type of meld. Selde, pale and nervous, had shivered in her emerald green bridal dress and placed her own fingers on Senet’s face. Eyes wide with trepidation as Sidon had corrected her position. They had practiced often in the weeks preceding the ceremony, but the enormity of the situation was enough to cause them both to tremble.

Tolen had made a low, encouraging sound in his throat and Selde, who had been unconsciously leaning back away from the Healer and her new husband, straightened to accept the Bond. Closed her eyes, listened to Senet’s sensual voice speaking in his far northern accent: “T’nash-vey kae dur-tor kae, t’nash-vey adun’a kam…”

Selde had smiled. Senet had added “kam” to the traditional vows on his own. Adun’a kam. My cherished wife. 

Tears on her cheeks. The mind Touch often called tears forth in her, a physiological quirk that sometimes expressed in non-telepathic species when mind-linked. They stood and Selde concluded the ceremony with vows from Earth: “Love is friendship caught fire; it is quiet, mutual confidence, sharing and forgiving. It is loyalty, through good and bad times. It settles for less than perfection, and makes allowances for human weaknesses...” Words by a poet, who had lived and died long ago. Her hands in his, her green-eyed calm and his dark-eyed joy quiet in the air as she spoke.

Vekon had toddled forward and clutched Selde’s skirts as she spoke the last few lines: “Love is content with the present, hopes for the future, and does not brood over the past _.” _ She had reached down and held the boy’s hand in hers. 

T’Vell and Tolen had gone home with T’Laet and Vanet; well into her second trimester, T’Vell had to rest often and needed companions while her husband was away at work. Vulcans, with their long torsos and cartilage-knit ribs, carried their children low in their bellies. Though her lung capacity and heart remained unaffected, T’Vell found it difficult to remain on her feet for long and worked from home. She had sat through most of the ceremony, her feet and lower legs well-massaged and wrapped beneath her gray gown with lavender and soothing oils against the skin. Four more months of this discomfort, at least. 

The grand house in Pret, meant as a habitation for seven full families, felt too empty for Senet and Selde. They often spent their days outdoors, drinking in the coolness of Vulcan winter. 

“In D’sal we would have snow for the entire season,” Senet said, watching several non-migratory birds in a llal’en tree. They flicked their wings and groomed their glossy black feathers of dew. Like Terran ravens, but with bright red eyes and garnet-purple primaries. “My sister Kess would often initiate exercises in velocity and vector with spheres manufactured from snow. She and Vell would build a snow structure and ambush me.”

“You mean you got into snowball fights with your little sisters?” 

“I believe I said as much.”

Selde chuckled and rolled onto her side to rest her head against his chest. The sound of his heart resonated from his left side. “So did you just take their volleys like an obedient target, or did you fight back?”

“I may have created several overly large snow spheres. Then I may have dropped them from above their ramparts while they were not looking.” Senet enjoyed this teasing exercise in semantics, his wife’s—his wife!—contralto voice against his chest. “Their vocalizations became quite loud when snow fell inside their coat collars.”

“I will bet. Once, Tolen and I were in Colorado for Christmas. We must have been about eight and eleven. Went sledding and pfff! right into a fresh powder snowbank. I told him that greasing the skids without at least a few trial runs was idiotic. But did he listen?”

“I extrapolate no.”

“You extrapolate correctly. Usually Tolen is so thorough; perhaps he learned to be on that day. Vanet had us parked in front of the fireplace the rest of the day.”

Silence lay over them for a long while as they rested and enjoyed the cold wind that danced through the valley. The newness of their Bond meant that they did not yet have the modulation, born of long practice, of older Vulcan couples. Emotions flowed and ebbed between them, unintentional musings colliding with Thoughts along the bond. Healer Sidon had recommended to Selde that she continue her meditation disciplines before the ceremony. She should begin to integrate some of the thought-shielding techniques once the marriage Bond was in place. She had started integrating these even before the wedding, but they proved useless without the telepathic link; these were mental muscles that she would simply have to learn how to flex. There was no equivalent Human discipline.

For his part, Senet was patient and kind. His divorce and subsequent diagnosis had left him mentally and emotionally wrung, something that no one else but Selde and Healer Sidon knew. Indeed, the night of their marriage he had lain in bed with his wife beside him, tears rolling hot onto his temples. Human emotional range rendered his strong mental shields porous; he wept when he felt her sadness or sympathy, his laugh came out of Selde’s mouth when he was amused. Unsettling and humorous to them both. Before their wedding came congratulations from other Humans who had wed Vulcans. With these felicitations came advice for the newlyweds: they would need a swift Seclusion just to find mental equilibrium within the Bond. The other sort of Seclusion could come later.

“What am I thinking?” Selde now asked, as early night seeped down the mountains along with chilled air. 

“The same thing I am. We are hungry and it is getting colder. I do not need the Bond to know that.” Senet rolled to his feet with Selde moving lithely beside him. They walked hand in hand back up the wash.

Selde glanced down at her husband’s left hand, where a white gold ring glimmered on his ring finger. The slender band on hers was an unaccustomed feeling; Starfleet disallowed any kind of personal ornamentation while in uniform, and as she had spent more time in-uniform than out she had grown used to not wearing jewelry. The tip of her thumb found her ring and caressed it. Felt naked already if she took it off when cooking.

The house glowed with warmth when they returned. Oil lamps burning, cedar incense lingering in the air from their afternoon meditations. Senet went to the kitchen and began preparing dinner with comfortable precision: water for rice noodles, bok choi sliced on the slant, mushrooms, hard tofu, water chestnuts. Hoisin sauce, sesame seeds. Selde was filling the electric kettle for tea when the ground-level door opened. Senet arched an eyebrow in inquiry,  _ who?-not-expecting-family-keys-the-latch _ along their Bond.

“Sa-kai?”

“Hello?”

Selde tilted her head at the unfamiliar voices. Starfleet training, activated by the unfamiliar situation, caused her to grab a small cast iron skillet to use as a melee weapon if need be. Then recognition traveled through her mind link: Senet’s youngest sister T’Kess, on leave from the Academy.

“Ko-kai!” Senet dried his hands and thumbed the burners to low. Grinned with Selde’s happiness and composed himself before stepping into the main hall.

“Dif-Tor heh Smusma,” Senet said, all slender stride. He caught T’Kess in a familial embrace of hands, his palms and fingers cupping hers. 

“Sochya eh Dif.” T’Kess bowed.

Selde tilted her head, feeling T’Kess’s second-hand Touch through her husband. T’Kess stood so much taller than when she had last seen her as a very young girl. Senet’s high cheekbones, T’Vell’s mischievous mouth. Eyes of a startling light amber and hair cut in a black bob that made her resemble the actress Louise Brooks. Almost exactly. A cadet’s slim black jumpsuit with engineering-red piping. She chattered, animated for a Vulcan, and here and there her speech was peppered with Standard slang: a real slingshot, a Denebrian slime devil of a steward.

_ Precocious _ , Selde thought.

_ As always _ , Senet answered.

“This is Tenou Makoto, my fiancé,” T’Kess said, indicating the handsome Japanese man who stood behind her. He grinned and beamed, his shaggy bangs falling almost rakishly over his forehead.

_!!! _ Senet’s wordless exclamation rang down the Bond.

_ Humans seem to be catching _ , Selde’s amused reply. A grin, wicked, shone from her face.  _ Vindication, Adun _ . 

“Great to meet you,” Makoto said, shaking Senet and Selde’s hands in turn, whether from ignorance of Vulcan tradition or defiance of them they did not know. His hand in Senet’s sparked a Touch and revealed a heart that was well meaning, pure in its intention. Smooth tenor voice, a small stutter revealing his excitement. “Kess told me a lot about her brother, and I was looking forward to meeting you both. Congratulations on your marriage.”

T’Kess set her Starfleet duffel down and removed a long wooden box. Pushed it into Senet’s hands. “For you.”

“It’s from my vineyard,” Makoto said, keeping his civilian duffel on his shoulder, as if he was not quite sure where he stood in this familial tableau. “Near Occidental, California. Bohème-Nord Cellars.”

“Ah, I’ve heard of it,” Selde said, putting a hand out and taking his duffel from him, drawing back to welcome him into the room. “Been there, in fact. My last year at the Academy my friend Kar’onn and I went for a joyride up Highway 1. You had a sommelier from Rigel 7, a!Rin, I think?”

“We do! My dad’s friend, going way back.” Makoto smiled, watching T’Kess and Senet draw toward the northern hall. Nervous, folding his hands behind his back then cramming them in his jeans pockets. “I was still taking horticulture classes over in San Rafael. You graduated in ‘62, right?”

“Correct.”

“We brought you a ‘54 Syrah. You like reds, right?”

After their guests were settled and fed they gathered in the central hall. Selde felt as if she were quietly dreaming, the bemused expression on her face not quite her own. She knew through the marriage Bond that Senet was flabbergasted underneath his monastic calm. She also knew that T’Kess was now simply Kess because she did not want the married woman’s honorific. She also had told their parents of her Human fiancé after hearing of Senet’s divorce. Solidarity with her brother, just as T’Vell had shown. 

_!!!_ _How is this behavior appropriate?_ Senet thought for the nth time that evening while they listened to Kess and Makoto tell the story of their courtship. They had met when Kess was “vineyard hopping” with her friends Jat of Argo and Dominick Wilder. 

_ It sounds developmentally appropriate to me, Senet-kam. She is 27 years old. _

_ Too young for a Vulcan. _

_ Not for a Human, and she is living on Earth. When did you become an old man, my beloved? _

Kess sat back, sleek as a cat, and swirled her after-dinner wine with an expert’s precision. Makoto watched her with open affection. Explained that his family had owned and operated the vineyard for almost two hundred years, would get their Bicentennial Seal that July. Kess had a refined palette. Maybe she should leave the Academy and try her hand at the art of being a Master Sommelier? Whatcha think, Kessie?

  
  


***

“Baa baa black sheep, have you any wool? Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full.” Selde giggled into her palms as she lay on her back on the marriage bed. Giddy past midnight, Senet between her thighs and twitching with pleasure as they made love. “We are black sheep becoming quite a flock, are we not?”

“Yes.” He cupped her face in a glancing meld that allowed her to feel what his body felt during coitus. She quieted and concentrated with him, her hands going to his hips, tracing his scars, encouraging with wordless caress. 

Afterward, they lay tracing one another’s hands in the dark. Watched the oil lamp flicker. Coming down off of red wine and hormonal elation. Senet breathed deep and meditated upon the vo’ektau mantra: kov vo’ektau, kov. 

“Kess returned to Vulcan to separate from her husband, didn’t she?” Selde asked, shutting her eyes. Smelling Senet’s coppery scent, the sesame oil that lingered on his wrist, the cedar soap he used during basin baths. 

“Indeed. Doing so now is the logical choice. S’tet will have time to find another mate through his Clan’s matchmaker.”

“The compassionate choice,” Selde offered. Listened to the steady, up-tempo thrum of Senet’s pulse. Addicted to it.

“She has always been a bit of an outsider.” Senet, sleepy, pressed his mouth to Selde’s hair. Auburn catching fire in the lamplight.  _ Hja’e ko-kau. _

_ Pot, kettle, black, my Senet.  _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The vows Selde quotes here are from a poem by Laura Hendricks, "Love is Friendship Caught Fire". The last part of the poem is left off. 
> 
> Al Vulcan words are from Memory Alpha and the Vulcan Language Dictionary.


	12. Sonder

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sonder - neologism created by John Koening in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. The word means "the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own."

An early nomadic life had advantages that translated well to service in Starfleet; Selde seldom felt displaced and knew how to experience life with Vulcanlike mindfulness. She tried for a philosophy of reserving judgement. The disadvantage was that she tended toward cynicism and had little patience for wide-eyed innocence. She knew it was a fault and probably had to do with unresolved resentment; her mother Heather had been one of those wide-eyed innocents, sampling disciplines or philosophies or experiences with all the depth of a butterfly flitting from flower to flower.

Which is why she was chagrined when Makoto, sweet as he was, followed her into the desert on her morning walks. He woke early with her, made coffee, sprinkled nutmeg and sugar in his, poured cream into hers, accepted pain au chocolat or kreyla bread from the kitchen. He chattered the whole time, and she, born a night owl living on an early rising planet, tried to smile true instead of baring her teeth.

This was only temporary, she reminded herself. He and Kess would be going back to Earth soon.

The unpleasantness of her separation from S’tet blew over quickly, much to everyone’s surprise. Senet, in the close privacy of the marriage bed, opined that his sister and S’tet must have come to some sort of an arrangement, for Vulcan women did not have rights to initiate divorce on their own. Desertion, damage, or ill-health were the only leverage they had in nullifying an arranged marriage, outside of Kali-fee.

“Isn’t that illogical?” Selde had asked, the set of her jaw showing her anger at this tradition. Senet had agreed, saying it made sense only as a relic, but individuals were quicker to accept change than societies at large. He didn’t give voice to the fact that if he had only gone to see his Healer sooner that he might have sidestepped his marriage with T’Gris entirely; infertility was grounds enough for a woman to be granted severance. The pain that this fact brought him kept his mouth sealed, but it voiced within the Bond. Selde’s anger had run away like melting snow, and she had sheltered him with her body and the fall of her hair. 

Kess and Senet had already gone into ShiKahr before sunrise in order to have time to visit with T’Vell. If Kess was going back to the Academy she would miss her niece’s birth; the baby had been confirmed a girl by the second trimester scan. Little Mir, due at the end of spring. 

Selde now pulled her boots from the chest at the bottom of the stairwell. A winter rain ticked on the window panes, drizzle misting the higher elevations. Makoto’s offering of coffee steamed in a blue steel cup at her hip as she sat down. Pulled on a stubborn boot with a muttered “Ki’guv.”

“What’s that mean?” Makoto, irrepressible, stood ready and almost bouncing on his toes. Well-worn hiking boots clamped to his ankles, black jeans, a heavy new woolen jacket in a Vulcan cut. Sage green. Suited him.

“It’s a Vulcan equivalent of the F word,” Selde said, chuckling in spite of herself. “I picked up a bit of a foul mouth from my mother when I was young. I began life at an artists’ commune. I also spent a year away from home when I was 17, and the company I kept made it worse. It’s a bad habit.”

“Ah. Wheat grass?” Makoto asked, passing his hand over the top of a patch of green in a rectangular wood planter sitting on the hall table. Nervous, changing the subject. “For smoothies, right?”

“It is an ancient strain of mut, actually. A Vulcan grain. It was rediscovered by archaeologists a few years ago. Similar story to how Anasazi beans were rediscovered in North America in the 20th century. Neat stuff.” Selde pulled her other boot on and scowled at the laces. Makoto said “right?” so often she had begun to tack it onto the end of her own sentences, even if she didn’t speak it out loud. His was a verbal tic, born of anxiety and unfamiliar surroundings. “Thank you for coming this morning. We’re going to make an offering to M’sharis.”

“That fertility goddess, right?”

Selde gritted her teeth and fastened the cream wool jacket that Senet had given her for a Christmas present; the holiday fluctuated from year to year because of the misalignment of the Vulcan and Earth calendars, so they simply celebrated at the winter solstice. She took two grass mats under her arm and shouldered a red hemp bag that had once been her mother’s. It bulged with a few items that she would give to the spring. “Ready to go?”

“Just behind ya.”

Makoto had some social grace, and outside of the house he knew with instinctual uncanniness that Vulcans—and by extension, Selde—preferred outdoor experiences to be meditative ones. He went silent as they walked through the grey morning, his eyes darting about, quick to take everything in. They joined the main pilgrim trail to the grotto at a cairn that marked the family property; someone had already been to the spring and gone back again, judging by the footprints in the wide sand path. Most likely someone from the midwife academy.

The grotto, still dark because of the heavy sky, smelled of wet earth and water. A deep bass hum trembled on the edge of hearing. The voice of the spring, amplified by the overarching sandstone. The stillness of the water was an illusion; it was the highest point in an underground river system that moved through much of the Kahr Basin. In past millennia the hum had been known as the Voice of M’sharis. Before their scientific knowledge of air and water pressures, Vulcans had assigned the sound as the voice of the goddess in the transition phase of labor, the guttural groans of instinct and the need to push. It was a rare sound and a fortuitous one; Selde had come to meditate and make offerings for Mir’s upcoming birth.

She had been hesitant to allow Makoto to attend at first, but unlike many Earth customs, the rituals surrounding reproduction on Vulcan were not delineated by sex. Their philosophy seemed to be that it took two parents to make a child, so it took both sexes to honor both conception and birth. The scientific—previously spiritual—facts of making children came easily to Vulcan culture and were not subjects of taboo; it was the other aspect, the loss of identity, loss of mental control, the loss of the rational self during the Time of Mating that earned Silence.

Selde unfurled the grass mats on the sand. They were thick, made by T’Vell from last year’s grasses, and just wide enough to sit in lotus position. The gently sloping sand was damp, and chilled air curled about the hollow. She glanced up at Makoto, charmed to find him looking unsure what to do with himself. Keep his coffee close, put it away by the wall, kneel, stand, chant, offer to help?

“This ritual isn’t tremendously rigid,” Selde said, offering a kind smile. She liked him, in spite of his relentless optimism. “It’s a local sort of communion, not a High Tradition observed planetwide. Each Clan and family has its own version. There are no elder statespeople or social constraints. It’s okay, Makoto.”

He blew a relieved breath out through his lips and sat on a grass mat, which crackled beneath him. “Thanks. The only Vulcan I really know is Kess, and she’s a bit of an iconoclast.”

“You noticed?” Selde smiled and passed Makoto a stick of dune-cedar incense. “Here. Stick this in the sand in front of your mat. I’ll light it once we’re ready. And yes, Kess has always been a bit of a rebel. I did not know her well as a child, but the few times I did meet her she made an impression. T’Vell and Kess’s parents would sometimes bring Kess for the journey when Vell would visit. She once incited an insurrection among my brother, Vell, and myself, against bedtime while the sun was still up. Vulcan summer days are long; almost 18 hours at the 45th parallel.”

“You must have been bouncing off the walls.” Makoto smiled to himself and took care to position his joss stick exactly center. 

“To put it mildly. Kess was squired away home soon after that.”

“Did you know Senet then?”

“No. I didn’t meet him until two years ago. His parents always kept him home. Firstborn children in his Clan often do not have the freedom of the younger ones. There are other reasons why traditions sit heavier on his shoulders than those of his sisters. He is part of the family trade.” Selde sent a reaffirmation of love along her Bond to Senet and felt a telepathic caress in return. Warm, as if she were freezing and transported to a mild summer day with the scent of dry grass and ponderosa pine upon the air.

“Yeah, my dad knows what that’s like,” Makoto said. Settling into a cross-legged position that was not quite lotus. He moved with the ease of someone almost always on his feet in uneven terrain. “He was the oldest son and was just presumed to be a vintner at birth. I have an older sister. Ami. A sculpture artist. She goes by the name Ai.”

“‘Love.’ Kinda like the Greek word ‘agape.’”

“Yes.” Makoto wriggled with the thrill of recognition that Selde knew some of his ancestral language; he did not yet know that her father was a linguist and had taught her a smattering of diverse tongues. “My dad told us both that if we didn’t want to carry on the family vineyard when we grew up he would understand. Luckily I grew up interested. With Ami he let her go any way she wanted. For a while there we thought she was going to be a marine biologist, but then she discovered casting bronze.”

Selde thought of Senet, how he was trying his hand at poetry at her suggestion. So far her favorite verse was: 

“The dance of Gil, barefoot in summer storms,

drops of water like stars in her hair—

she bows to the rain without breaking.”

Not ready to share that with the world yet, not even family or one as affable as Makoto. 

She pulled a green enamel cup out of her bag and walked to the spring to fill it with water. When she returned Makoto, seeing her intention, hollowed out a level place for it and sat back to watch Selde’s sure movements. She placed the cup on the damp earth and lay in it several dried v’pret flowers, a dried lavender sprig, a raw apatite stone that glimmered blue-green in the winter dim. A copper circle that had once been a link in a bracelet belonging to her own mother joined the other objects at the bottom of the cup. She took a few dried v’pret petals out of a silver shawl and sprinkled them around the cup before surrounding everything with the garment.

“The bowl of water represents the womb and the petals are a traditional offering to M’sharis,” Selde explained as she lit the cedar incense sticks. “The apatite represents Tolen, the lavender T’Vell. The copper circle is baby Mir. Aside from her name and her Vulcanness I don’t know anything about her, so it’s best to be neutral.” She smiled to show this was a joke; sometimes even her own people had a hard time telling the difference after her upbringing on Vulcan. “I am going to meditate upon the mantra ‘i’fa yumau’ik.’ Literally, ‘flowing birth,’ asking for an easy one.”

“Any mantra I should focus on?”

“Any you like. I can supply a Vulcan one if you prefer, or you can use one of our Earth imports.”

Makoto laughed, understanding her deadpan humor at last. “You have one for an easy engagement?”

“Not a traditional one. Maybe ‘sochya’boch koon’ul’? It means ‘peaceful betrothal’. No. Too much of a mouthful.” Selde scuffed her heel in the sand and thought of Sesa, the lack of some translations. “Maybe just ‘sochya.’ Peace. It rolls off of the tongue.”

“Perfect.” Makoto watched her arrange her legs and glanced skyward. Rain pattered into the sandstone oculus and dripped into the spring below. The smell of cedar joined the scent of rain.   
  
“If you need to go back at any time it’s okay,” Selde said, pressing her palms together in front of her heart. “The meditation usually takes half an hour at minimum. When I am done I’ll lay the petals on the surface of the water and then leave.”

“I’ll stay. See you on the other side.” Makoto grinned and lay his hands on his knees. Closed his eyes and began breathing deep.

Selde watched him for a moment, the way his legs twitched with discomfort at the unaccustomed stillness. He reminded her of Vanet in that way, for her foster father was a methodical man but also one who liked to keep moving. Like a monk, praying through cloisters. She would have to introduce Makoto to walking meditation.

She closed her eyes and sank into the meditation with several deep breaths, clear of direction or mantra. Then began to breathe with the words i’fa yumau’ik in her mouth. She preferred to meditate in silence as Vulcans did, rather than chanting aloud. Envisioned Mir thriving, growing, emerging in early springtime. V’pret flowers in bloom.

***

The sky cleared by evening, particulates in the desert air knocked down to the earth below so that the stars shone achingly clear. Senet explained to Makoto that Vulcan’s sister planet was known as T’Kuhl when waning, as it was this night, and T’Kuht when waxing. Tonight she was at her most dim, still huge in the sky like a lidded eye. 

“Anyone live up there?” Makoto asked, leaning against Kess to peer out the windows. They sat close on the long, curved couch, almost opposite Senet and Selde. Kess studied a report on the nutrition-fulfilling grain her new sister-in-law had created for an Andorian-Galean hybrid.

“No. The Watcher is much too volatile. Vulcan itself is habitable only in specific bands of latitude as a result; the inhabitable zones are able to be traversed by ground car and antigrav railway, but settlements are near impossible. Not that my people have not tried, during times of political and social upheaval. The A’kweth Alliance, named after indigenous Vulcan fauna, once hid in the Forge for nearly two hundred years before an outgassing of CO2 from a volcanic lake ended the movement.”

“Pre-Reformation, if course,” Selde said, tickled by an almost unidentifiable trace of humor from Senet along their Bond. What amused him about this unfortunate incident? A faint ping of answer: something that he and Sarok had shared together, a brotherly, bawdy in-joke about the word “a’kweth,” nothing to do with the Alliance at all. A good sign; remembrance of his friend was beginning to replace active grief. She glanced at Makoto. “There was also a group of bootleggers just after the time of Surak, when a temperance movement swept the planet. They made k’vass and t’mara-omi in secret stills in the Zul Canyons. The first drink works only on Vulcans, but the latter will knock you back on your haunches.”

“That’s how Bohème-Nord got its start. Vodka during Prohibition. Potatoes are a bit easier to hide than grape vines,” Makoto said, grinning and relaxing back with his cup of rooibos tea. He settled in to read over Kess’s shoulder. 

Senet offered his hand to Selde as they cuddled close. Within the bounds of the familial home such close contact was common between mated pairs, while a certain decorum was reserved for public spaces. Senet traced his paired index and middle fingers over Selde’s. His fingertips flushed green with the physical contact, pleasure singing at his pressure points. The caress felt at turns like a kiss, a whispered reaffirmation, a private reassurance. Other times the caress stirred deeply erotic feelings, awakened desire. 

Ozh’esta. 

Selde closed her eyes as their tracing fingers lingered, pressed together at the tips. Sensual, like Senet’s voice. Gooseflesh shivered up her arms as Senet traced his fingertips over the back of her hand, around her wrist. The touch turned erotic for a heart beat before lightening into loving, teasing, a wordless pleasure of being in each other’s company. Sinking into their Bond.

_ How was T’Vell? _

_ Healthy; she experienced The Awakening several weeks ago and is communicating with Mir. She says the child thinks in colors, temperatures, scents. _

_ Colors? _

_ Colors filtered through womb light. In this case, shades of green. _

_ “Green is so good for the eyes.” _

_??? _

_ A Human aphorism. It was reflexive. Sorry. _

_ No need to apologize. Juniper-tree-soughing-in-wind-Virgo-blue-sunrise. _

_ Senet-nighsky-water. How was Tolen-my-brother? _

_ Well. He and Vell-sister-lavender touch often. He guards her. _

_ Instinctual? _

_ Yes-desire. Children for us soon? Desire-mine. I want to see children with your eyes. _

_ Soon. One year, we promised ourselves.  _

_ Vokau-veh. Taluhk nash-veh k'dular. _

_ “Friendship caught fire.” _

_ Yontau-veh. _


	13. Subterranean

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter rated M for mature.

The smell of minerals and water filled his lungs and pooled in his mouth. Dark, absolute dark, and the sound of water pinging, dripping, sighing, rushing far below. Senet hung, swaying on the rappel rope, one hand on the belay-gri and the other extended into the cavern that surrounded him. A womb. The closest he would come to the beginning of his existence. The closest he would come to the end of his existence, the cold, dark death he had dodged on Keristar. His eyes struggled to understand what they were seeing, this void that his ears, skin, and extrasensory reach told him was vast. He closed them to spare the nerves. Wanted never to leave.

The comm badge fastened to his tool belt chirped, and T’Xian’s sharp-cleave voice cut through the dark. “Senet? Wilat shiyau tu?” 

Her voice echoed so that it seemed there were a thousand women there with him. 

“Sirya na’nen.” He slapped the comm and managed to keep the sigh out of his voice. Thumbed the headlamp integrated with his helmet. Light shivered against the walls. The cavern soared above him; he could see ethereal columns of cream-colored flowstone, some of the stalagtites and stalagmites so ancient that they met in columns the width of two adult le-matya. A shadowed abyss lay below him.The belay-gri whirred as he rappelled the rest of the way to the floor, where a red-orange pipe disappeared into a honeycomb of metal utility tunnels. 

The cave floor smacked under his black boots and clay striped his blue jumpsuit. The light reflected off of the walls, shivering with water, and caught the reflective strips at his shoulders and narrow waist. Light needled his eyes. He scowled and tugged the belay carabiner with more force than was needed, broke the spring.

“Kanit’ashik  _ ki’guv _ !” He snarled and threw the carabiner into the tunnel, where it skittered and clanked over the grated floor. 

Closed his eyes and tried for an even breath; it had been a hard morning. Selde, waking in a foul mood after fitful sleep, had turned a cold shoulder on him at the breakfast table. Saying  _ I love you but I just need some time to myself today, Adun _ . She had taken her wedding band off and left it in the jadeite box on her night table; he had noticed and asked if he should bring it to her. She had glared up at him and asked if Daddy wanted to cut up her eggies before he packed her school lunch. He had left with a mental bark of  _ illogical, b’elak parrik komihn _ . And took the tram by himself to ShiShira, the easternmost city within his jurisdiction. Glad to have some distance between him and his illogical wife. He now gritted his teeth at the memory of it, the embarrassment and prick of self-pity. Selde’s coldness had reminded him too much of his father’s and his ex-wife’s. How did she phrase it? “Hit too close to home.”

The Bond between him and Selde brought them both more joy than strife. He felt fulfilled after a childhood of loneliness. 

He thought that he had mastered this particular feeling. This mastery was easily undone when Selde withdrew from him, even if it was justified for her mental health. Humans lacked the telepathic structures present in the Vulcan species; they could exist by themselves, in solitude, and never feel alone. Not so for Vulcans, who needed a web of telepathic contact between parents and children, mates and friends, in order to feel whole. Selde’s need was a valid one. He saw that. He understood. It still hurt.

“...terauik ta nen-mev?” T’Xian, about the man pipe junction he was there to check. There was an edge of impatience in her voice that the electronic comm magnified. 

“Ah’t.” He answered. Flicked his left hand in an obscene gesture that his workmate would not see, all the way up at the surface monitors. He set to work, checking the water main with his tricorder, repairing a hairline crack at the join with a gasket injector. Too much dross in the third locking bolt. They would need replacing ahead of schedule. 

Fatigue suddenly dragged at him, and he checked the air for carbon monoxide. Found nominal amounts. Again, the light caught at the shimmering walls, stabbed his eyes. A faint inquiry of concern from Selde touched his mind, and he sent her a terse  _ i am well _ with a wave of bone-deep sorrow that followed after it. Winced at her telepathic call of alarm. He took several breaths deep into himself, meditated upon emptiness, acceptance, mastery. Felt like an hour, was only a minute. 

_ I am well. I will return home this night-hour-22:00-bed-sex.  _ Embarrassment trailed after the Thought like the bright tail of a comet.

Her wordless love and amusement reached him, and he smiled into the dark. Mutually forgiven.

Senet bent to finish his tasks and stood to stretch, sat down with a wave of nausea and panic crashing into him. Heat flared against his temples and cheeks, his pulse high in his throat. Fear. Reached down the Bond. Panicked, as if she were slipping away.  _ Selde?! _

_ Adun? _ Her confused, calm inquiry. Pressing when he did not reply.  _ Senet? _

_ Ah’t, yes.  _ Senet sat on his haunches back against the wall of water. Coolness bled through his jumpsuit. His eyes felt hot inside his skull, his skin on fire. He swallowed, trying to identify if what he felt was illness or thirst or sexual arousal or—oh. This was not what he had expected from the half-phrases and discomforted looks from men in his family and friends circle who had endured pon farr. There was no raging need to couple, no burn of sexual desire. Yet. However, his control was shattered; anxiety crawled beneath his skin and he wanted to hide in some small, dark hold deep under the earth… Senet barked a laugh, without humor. He wanted to be exactly where he was, with Selde beside him, an endless fount of water to drink, his skin bare against hers. Just to feel her warmth and her heartbeat.

T’Xian’s voice crackled on the comm. He ignored it. Steepled his trembling fingers and tried for calm, for center, found it, shaky as it was. Touched the comm on his hip and told his workmate to go on without him. He was going home. 

“Sor’Senet?” Her voice had taken on the same sharp-cleave sound that he was used to; this was the air of Vulcan Silence that he had expected. She would pretend that nothing was wrong and call for an auto-shuttle to come and retrieve him from the water plant. He could be home in three hours, all without seeing anyone. 

“Be well, T’Xian,” he said, tying the ascension rope into the hardpoint loops of his harness. Figure-eight knot. Pleasing, logical. On Earth, the symbol of infinity. He stood alone at the bottom of the cavern, knowing that he could walk the two-point-eight kilometers to the emergency stairwell, but this way felt right. A connection to the thrum and life-blood of his planet, a water-carved cave of karst topography and limestone. He ascended the rope using the belay-gri and hung at the midpoint again, turned off his headlamp, hung suspended in the dark, cool void of the cavern. 

  
  


***

  
  


Selde knelt over the last of the spring flowers, her sky-blue dress billowing on a hot wind. Her scissors snipped a few pincushion blossoms, the last of the long, purple salvia, a wayward cane of v’minnet flowers. Even the cacti closed their fragrant petals to the approaching summer heat. They would bloom only at night, when the glowing ha’ravot would feed on their nectar. She thought of T’Vell and tiny baby Mir, both in Pon Thas, the Time of Milk. This was not a strict Seclusion; the family could receive visitors, but none save blood and by-marriage family could hold the infant. Her delicate, unschooled telepathic abilities made her vulnerable to psychic Touch. Selde, still new to the Disciplines of the Mind, had to rely on Senet to control her thoughts and emotions as she held the tiny babe. This seemed to have worked well, for Tolen took his daughter back from Selde’s arms and grinned, saying “She is content with you, Pretty Auntie.” The baby, yet too small to smile, had cooed and wrapped a handful of Selde’s auburn hair in her tiny fist. Would not let go. 

A hot wind rustled through the garden, the plants going dormant in the heat. This summer would be a true scorcher. Selde lifted her basket of flowers and turned directly into Senet’s arms. Flinched. She had not expected him for several more hours, and here he stood: pale, cheeks flushed, the whites of his eyes tinged faintly green with fever. He held her close, the embrace guarding rather than one of love or fondness. Arms clutching her, chin hooked over her shoulder. He trembled, and she returned the touch. She could smell him, his sweat, salt and cedar, the faint scent of sexual arousal and fear. Mate guarding. 

Oh. This was not what she had expected. The fear and suspicion were overwhelming, the need to mate secondary.

She shut her eyes and remembered what had happened in the Halls of Voice when she was a young woman, three weeks before she was set to leave for the Academy. A concert, violins and cello, a group of Vulcans and Betazoids playing Beriat of Riix’s Planet Rings Quartet. Sar, a young Vulcan xenobotanist from T’Laet’s lab had escorted her as a friend. At the midpoint intermission they had walked outdoors in the garden, a circle of stone walls and plants, all with white flowers meant to catch the light of T’Rukh in all of her phases. Sar had abruptly cornered her against a granite pillar. Towered over her, pressing close. She had frozen in place, on instinct, looked at the crushed gravel path behind him as he breathed in her scent. Pinned her in place with hands on the stone, pressed his hard body against hers. She had been aware of a knot of Vulcans standing nearby, each face vague but eyes sharp upon them. No one moved, and bit by bit she had tilted her head to show her throat. Sar seemed to snap back into himself and drew away with a hasty apology, stood by breathing hard and bewildered. Left her standing with her spine against the stone. One of the Vulcan women had approached Selde and gave her a glass of water, sat next to her in Sar’s vacant seat for the last part of the concert. Selde had heard barely a note. Trembled with the closeness that Sar had forced upon her, his overwhelming presence lingering. How excited she had been amid the fear. 

Now, Senet pressed against her in much the same way, the pressure in his body intense, needful. He buried his face into her hair and inhaled deeply; she could sense no Thoughts along the bond, only a tangle of emotions and needs, self-revulsion, panic, a fear that he would hurt her. Rape her. Guilt, preemptive and raw.

_ Hush, hush. It is well, Senet-kam. We were expecting this. _

_ I am undone. _

_ You are  _ healthy _! _

_ Ruin. _ He shook hard in her arms and lifted her off of the ground. The basket fell, rolled, flowers spilling, and Selde clasped her legs about his waist. Pressed his pelvis toward hers with a hook of her heel. Senet thrust against her once. Groaned deep, from his chest.  _ Take you. _

“Inside,” she said aloud, sliding to the ground and tugging him after her, not minding the clay soil that scorched her feet. His hand burning hot in hers. 

They made it to their rooms, both not remembering the door, the stairs, the hall. Only cool shadow, their skin bare as their clothes fell away. Senet seized her in the middle of their room. Grasping her wrists, hard enough to bruise. Selde’s legs trembled with desire; she wanted all of his weight on her, the sharpness of his hip bones and the press of his thigh, his taut belly. Senet released her wrists and reached for her face. Cupped her jaw in both hands, his thumbs pressed to the meld points just beneath the outer corner of her eyes. Her green eyes, the color of his blood. He stared into them, the tips of his fingers finding meld points under her ears, along her throat. Felt her steady pulse, smelled the rich iron of her blood. Her pupils dilated as the meld deepened, accentuating base instincts, drive and desire, hunger, snapping along her brain stem. 

The traditional method for sexual intercourse on Vulcan was to take a mate on their hands and knees. Sand, hot wind, thorns. All could burn and chafe. Senet let Selde go at last and turned her about with a span of his hands. Took her to the soft green rug and pushed her shoulders down, drew her hips up. Entered her swiftly, grasping her hips. Selde trilled with delight and desire, her cheek against the wool, a grin on her face. Ah, this was good, this was pleasure. She gripped the wool rug and pushed backward against her husband. He gasped. Filled his lungs, groaned in his chest.

Again, again, again, with barely any rest in between. Senet breathed hard, sweat curling his hair against his temples and the nape of his neck. Selde hummed with pleasure fulfilled, tasted salt on her own arm with her grin, her sweat cool in the valley of her spine. Senet thrust in a fatigued, helpless manner. How many times had it been, never once disconnecting? She didn’t care. It all felt wonderful. Wanted more. 

Senet shuddered and lay down beside her at last, his eyes closed, lashes dark against his cheek. They were flushed green, his forehead and cheekbones beaded with sweat. Lungs bellows of hot air. His lips were chapped. Starlight and an indigo-dark sky shone in the skylights. Selde rolled to her feet and visited the basin room. Brought back a pottery cup brimming with cold water, which shimmered black in the dark. Senet gulped the water, which trickled out the corners of his mouth and down his chin. Still trembling. Held still while Selde dipped her fingers into the jar of balm she had brought. Spread the cool, vanilla-scented grease on his lips. He trembled and crawled toward her, taking her on her back this time, her legs and arms folding around him in welcome. She trembled, too.

  
  


***

Three days of lovemaking wound down to a fourth day in which Senet did nothing but sleep for a full twenty-nine hours. Selde dressed in her flowing green skirts and retrieved her basket and shoes, kicked the spent flowers loose upon the wind, went to the spring of M’sharis and bathed naked in the light of T’Kuht. She laughed and lay on the sand, rubbed her skin with balm and herbed oils, anointed her hair and her feet. Walked naked back through the night with her dress trailing from her arm. She descended to her marriage rooms and drew a basin of warm water to bathe her sleeping husband. Senet stirred only a little, rousing to turn onto his back at her whispered words and held her wrist with a loose grip. Thumb over her pulse. A self-soothing gesture, one that she had learned early in their marriage. She rubbed warming lotion into his skin, worked over his muscles, which ached with strain. He had hummed, a wordless expression of gratitude, and slept again. Long and dreamless. 

***

  
  


“So these last six days are just for recovery.” 

“Apparently so.” Senet lay with his head propped up on one hand as they lay side by side, tracing one another’s nude bodies with their fingertips. They lingered over pressure points meant for healing and release of tension, rather than arousal. Neither wanted to mate in the traditional way; this lovemaking-by-caress was more than enough. Senet’s eyes were ringed by bruises, his cheeks spidered with broken green capillaries. Another side-effect of plak tow that he did not know about until it happened. He sighed and lay down fully. Shivered with gooseflesh as Selde traced his thigh. “Please don’t stop doing that, Adun’a-kam.”

“Still hurt?”

“Ah’t.” He had pulled a muscle in his left leg, and it throbbed with a dull ache. 

A thread of anger pulled through the Bond. Selde, angry on his behalf for not knowing what he needed for pon farr until he was in it, a literal trial-by-fire. The flames biochemical and hormonal in nature, rather than exterior combustion. He sympathized with the anger, felt it himself. If he ever had a nephew he would take him aside and tell him everything. Answer any questions asked of him.

Selde brought him fruit, cheese, and bread on the copper tray she had brought from Earth, long ago. Endless bowls of water, pots of tea. Senet was yet too tired to move much, and vertigo claimed him twice as he staggered from bed to the toilets. Swallowed shame, accepted as Selde lay beside him on the stone floor until he could rise. He still could not yet meditate, so Selde sat at their bedside and spoke in a low murmur, guiding him through calming imagery and anointing his wrists with lavender oil. He wanted to give her something in gratitude, but he did not know what.

“Why not a child?” she asked, drawing a soft blanket about his shoulders.

Senet smiled. 


End file.
